[geeks] Re: Super Sun3

[Michael Thompson]

>I was surfing ebay, and I saw this Dual MC68040 VME Single Board Computers
>(http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1236413911).
>
>The following occured to me.  Many Sun3 owners run NetBSD, OpenBSD, or
>linux instead of SunOS.  So, one could take 4 or these boards, cram them
>into a Sun3/160 chassis, and run linux SMP with Mosix patch on them.
>Thus, making a Super Sun3. 
<snip>

VMEbus doesn't support cache coherency so SMP across the backplane won't
work. There are other possibilities though. You could run SMP on each board
and then cluster the boards with Beowulf software. You could get 42 CPUs in
a 19" rack using commercial 21 slot VMEbus subracks. You could also use
BusNet to run TCP/IP across the VMEbus backplane and get about 20 MB/s
between boards.



Michael Thompson
E-Mail: M_Thompson at IDS.net