[geeks] valuation on a sparc 2 / ss10?

[Craig Armour]

>> not sure why i'm bothering with my sparc 5's, 10's and 20's anymore, 
>> they're all uniproc machines :(


I have a classic under my desk with an extra ethernet card which handles 
  moveing packets around just dandy.  It also does dhcp,dns,jumpstart 
and boots linux on my javastation, which incidently has more power than 
any of my sun boxes.


> SPARCstation 2 (The SS1 made us drool, but the SS2 was truly ass-kicking)


I thought the IPX was cooler, SS2 in a lunch box

> (You will notice the lack of the E10K, which we all know is one of my 
> favorites.  It's really not a "Sun" system, in that a goodly portion of 
> it was really designed by Cray, and can be traced back through FP 
> Systems to Celerity.  It was a good purchase, however...)


Sun bought the E10k off SGI(Cray) for a rediculously cheap price.  SGI 
had decided that no one would ever need a box that big and decided their 
numa systems were the way to go.  They were looking to off load the E10k 
for only a little bit more than nothing.  bargain

> F15K (Scales to over 100 CPU's)


ah yes... the F15k.  nice machine.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to play 
much with one before my previous *grrr* employer decided my position was 
redundant.. bastards.  The HPC performance out of one of these suckers 
is nothing to cry home about at the moment.  Where as the E10k was a 
true SMP machine where the local and remote memory latencies were 
constant, the F15k is not, and the solaris VM model has not been 
designed for that scenario.  I beleive S9 has fixes in place but S8 with 
a memory intensive app on one of these suckers sucks.  Comparatively of 
course.  It still rocks :)

I'm not sure why you guys would even look at U2's etc when for a measily $1000 you can 

get a sunblade 100 at 500mhz.  I'd rather one of those suckers.  and for 
the rack mount fiends... x1's *shrug*

Cheers
Craig