[rescue] Rescued: SGI Altix 450

[Steven M Jones]

On 07/28/2016 12:22, Bill Braskey wrote:
>
> I just rescued an SGI Altix 450, with 24 blades of 2 Itanium2 CPUs each.

Congrats! I have a single Altix 450 IRU with four blades (and a half
dozen Altix 350 bricks). You might find this post about RAM for the 450
useful, depending on your configuration:
http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16728980


> Problem is, the "new" SGI are dicks about not releasing any documents or
> patches unless you are under a paid $ervice contract.

Until this year they still had docs (TechPubs was great) and some
software/patches going back to the MIPS-based systems online, but that
finally ended when they outsourced their customer support. The
Itanium-based software was a little harder to ferret out, but achievable
if you played with the URLs enough.

You may want SGI's Foundation Software and ProPacks, which at different
versions could include drivers, SGI-specific tuning and management
packages, and open source goodies.


> I was able to find a PDF of the basic user manual on manualslibDOTcom.
> Does anyone here have access to other manuals, parts lists, firmware
> patches, etc.?  I'm particularly interested in documents pertaining to
> power supply options, as this machine is set up for 3-phase power and
> really need to reconfigure it for 220/250V.

Have a close look at your IRUs (Individual Rack Unit, or blade center).
My A450 IRU runs on household 115VAC. You might be able to reconfigure
and/or substitute for the PDUs that are in your rack...

You should check out the doc collection at http://techpubs.jurassic.nl,
though the Hardware section only appears to have the earlier Altix 3000
systems covered. There's some coverage in the Linux section, and covers
SuSE Enterprise and RedHat on Altix.


> How about a working Linux install image that will save me the time of
> compiling my own?

Not sure about an image, but check the thread I put together here about
OS options for Altix:
http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16727812

I felt the best combination was SuSE SLES 11 SP 1, SGI Foundation
Software 2 SP 1, and ProPack 7 SP 1. These were the last combinations
that would install together and support Itanium-based SGI systems.
Unfortunately the TechPubs pages showing the support matrices are now
gone...

Of course if you don't want/need what's in SFS and ProPack, run whatever
you can get to boot.


> I'll post soon about other weird stuff I have...

Looking forward to it.
--S.