[rescue] SS1000

Sat Dec 7 01:02:57 CST 2002

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:59:46AM -0600, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
> So, I am curious. How does a SS1000 work? Is each mainboard a seperate
> machine, or are they one machine? If they are one machine, does that
> mean you can have a 16 processor machine in that small of a box
> (4x2xDualRoss or SM52X)? Or even 8 processors. If they are all one
> machine, how would they share memory?. It's just an unusual design (from
> my layman's perspective).

They use up to 8 CPUs I believe.  There is a 64-bit XDBus which
connects up to four CPU boards, each of which can hold 2 CPUs.  You
max out the RAM by filling up all the RAM slots on four CPU boards.

You can use up to 8 SM81s in it.

I assume that there is circuitry to determine which memory is local
and which must be accessed by the XDBus.

OS support is at least to Solaris 8, maybe 9, not sure.

I don't know if there is any other OS support like Linux or BSD, due
to the XDBus not being supported by any free OS.

> And what is the OS support like. 
> 
> (Can you tell I am tempted to buy one?)

As neat as they are I would recommend you buy something else.  The
fans are LOUD and it uses a lot of power.  And if you want faster SCSI
or 100BaseT ethernet you will have to buy the SBUS cards for it.

You would probably be happier with an SBus or PCI based UltraSparc
with 2 CPUs.

They weigh a lot, too.

Cordially
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