[rescue] SGI files Ch11 again, bought by Rackable for $25M

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 11:18:17AM -0600, Robert Darlington wrote:
> HIPPI was the world's first gigabit networking system.  

Isn't calling it gigabit a stretch when it was only 800mbit?

> Friends of mine
> worked with SGI to develop it, got an R&D 100 award out of the deal etc.
> Major breakthrough at the time (late 1990s I guess, before my time
> there).

HIPPI came out in the early '90s, like maybe '92.  Are you talking about
HIPPI-6400? That came out about '98-'99.

> When I came on, I was mostly handling software and OS stuff so I didn't have
> my hands inside the machines too often.  I do remember seeing the thick
> cables though and having to work around them.  One "router rack" with 4
> O2000 racks on each side with the heavy HIPPI cable interconnects.  So 9
> racks total per row, times 48 rows deep.   LOTS of cable.

The Blue Mountain press release states 48 128 processor systems.
Pictures clearly show that the center rack is the NUMAlink meta router,
needed to expand a O2k past 32 processors up to 128 processors.  

What the press release doesn't specify is how the 48 systems were
connected together, which I'm going to guess was either HIPPI-800 or
HIPPI-6400.  The inter-machine speeds that the press release mention
(650 gigabit) would require one HIPPI-6400 card per cage (2 cages per
rack) to be in that ball park.