On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, John Allain wrote: Ram asked for photos and these were the best that could be managed at the moment - admittedly should have compress them given terrible quality. Next time I'll do that else include a warning for those that take offence to inadvertantly downloading unsolicited noise. I think I was being lazy and assumed nobody would be on 9600 dialup :o) Andrew

James wrote: I think I saw that in the skip (dumpster) when I was at UWE (1998-2001). Still looked like a black monolith, but seemed to have been emptied of boards. -- John Honniball coredump at gifford.co.uk

Yes the box is Whitecross, a WX9020. It was one of the largest installs they did and has 342 T425s on dedicated processing cards (6 per card with 16MB ECC RAM per processor and 19 cards per crate, 3 crates). There's about another 50 dotted around on disk controllers, system controllers, etc. Thinking about it the links are synchronous at 10 or 20MHz so I doubt anything other than a direct P2P link would work. Shame ;) I did visit the Kognitio office and picked up a couple of the specially configured Solaris workstations (they use fibre for the inter crate communication and to the workstation). I was also given lots of documentation which is a real help! They did inform me that the links are very prone to noise which is one of the reasons for fibre, and they can mux 6 links per fibre. When I took the system I didn't have space or transport to take the rather nice custom built racks so ended up taking the individual crates, power supplies and a mass of fibre. These are now mounted in a standard 19" rack and I'm currently sorting out some suitable cooling. I've had a full crate and system controller running with diagnostics running on the workstation. That can see all the transputers. Still a way to go till it's a usable system :) Cheers, James