[rescue] IBM on ebay

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 01:46:05AM -0700, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> On Fri, 17 May 2002, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
> 
> > The only RS/6000's that have anything approaching "mainframe class"
> > performance are SP's, which are essentially smaller RS/6000's with
> > ancillary I/O processing and shared-memory clustering.  I want one. 8-)
> 
> As a poor fool that has had to spend many sleepless nights programming SP
> system(s), I can tell you that the SP/2 is not a shared memory machine.
> There is no single adress space, it is just a glorified cluster with each
> node being an actual RS6K workstation, and some fancy switching topology
> for internode communication. The only ime shared memory operation can be
> achieved is inside an SMP node, all internode communication is performed
> via message passing (usually using some sort o'MPI).

So, they couldn't even be bothered to do something along the lines of
what Mosix did? (SSI over a network).
 
> Why would anyone want one of these machines is beyond me... but it seems
> that IBM was able to market them pretty well.... A large SGI system with
> ccNUMA, now THAT I do want!

I'll take anything, but vector machines occupy a special place in my dreams.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd