[rescue] Challenge L Rescue

[Henry R. Bent]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> A friend of mine told me I could have one of these, with 4+ CPUs
> and several RAM and controller boards.
>
> I have never gotten it because it seems like it would be too large and
> draw too much power (I have a single 15A circuit for my two Sun's and a
> PC).  Nothing else is over 15A.

I have a 4 processor R10K version with 2.5GB of RAM, one standard SCSI
drive, two HVD drives, and one DAT drive.  If I only run one IO4 board the
power consumption is reasonable; if I put my second IO4 in the machine
complains about one of the power lines being under voltage.

If you have the system up and running, you can run "sysctlrd -p" to see
things like current temperature and (more importantly) actual voltages
from the power supply.

> Plus, the thing was big and heavy.

They're good for that.  Two of the wheels on mine are broken (%&^$
resellers) so I can't even push it around; that made it really fun to
transport.

> Anyone know what the real power requirements are for one as above, and
> with maybe 4 hard drives?

Eh... all I can say is I have mine on the same circuit with a Blade 100,
Apple Workgroup Server 95, PowerMac 8600, Dell Optiplex Gs+, and two or
three monitors and have never had a problem.  I'm not saying this is
necessarily a good idea, but it works.

> The manuals I found for it pretty well list maximum power draw only.
>
> Don't most systems like this have a document somewhere that gives you
> piece-by-piece power consumption?

DEC was good about that; I figured out that my VAX 4000/200, specced to
11A max, was only drawing about 3A in a pretty standard configuration.
I've never seen equivalent docs from SGI.

--
Henry Bent
hbent at cs.oberlin.edu