[rescue] New acquisition...

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 01 April 2004 12:11, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Apr 1, 2004, at 12:03 PM, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > A few days ago I paid for (and soon will be picking up) a new
> > addition to my friend's IBM SP... a set of 16 200MHz POWER-3 nodes
> > plus an actual SP switch, completing our acquisition of a whole SP
> > system. This was the "SQ" or development SP that Purdue had been
> > using until its recent demise (minus some parts which got sold back
> > to pay for new equipment).
> >
> > Total cost?  Well, aparently Sun Ultra 5's help, as I was able to
> > lower the price by buying a pile of them in addition (in various
> > states of disrepair), much like Purdue was able to lower the cost
> > of some Sun gear a few years ago by getting free Blade100s with it.
> >
> > Drum roll... whole purchase was $200, with a few U5's left over
> > after scraping together the working pieces.
>
>    OMG.  *falls over*

Well, they were stripped of disks, and only had 1/4 of their memory left 
(not to mention 2 bad nodes and 4 overall nodes without memory riser 
cards).

> > And the best part yet... I've already played with booting Linux on
> > the nodes, and it works!  There's no support for the switch card,
> > but as I have just one switch, my friend could use that exclusively
> > for the Microchannel half of the SP.
>
>    Uhhhhh...Linux?  On an SP?  Why??

Because it's the only 64bit POWER system I've got!  And, the only POWER 
machine that'll run Linux.  AIX is 'fun', but gets in the way of doing 
'useful' stuff with it.

> > Now, I just need to figure out where to put this stuff, which is
> > going to be the hardest part.
>
>    Shall I send you my address?

Hah.  Funny, the reason I was so happy is because I got it and you 
didn't. ;)

Pat
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