[rescue] CS6400s on ePay

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> --- Al Potter <apotter at spankingnuns.com> wrote:
>
> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3407566302&category=1484
> 
> THIRTEEN in one lot, no RAM - nice... ;^)

Yup.  John Mothershead and I had both posted about these; John was trying 
to pull together interested parties and coordinate a group buy.  He and I 
have corresponded at some length, and both have tried to reason with the 
seller about splitting up the batch and/or parting out the machines, but 
so far not much progress.

The RAM is supposedly proprietary, but I've done some side-by-side
comparisons of the SIMMs from the CS6400 and SIMMs from a SC2000E, and
they appear to be identical.  I have parts with the Cray part number on
them in both 60ns and 70ns, which is made all the more confusing by the
fact that I found SIMMs with the Sun part number in both speeds as well!  
According to the chips used, both types are using 4M x 4 RAMs... So if it
can be determined that the SS1000/E or SC2000/E 68-pin parts _can_ be used
in the CS6400, then perhaps RAM for these beasties could be found fairly
cheap.  It may even be possible to get one of the companies that made 3rd
party upgrades for the sun4d machines (none of them seem to list those
anymore) to run a batch, if enough people were interested...

The big problems are still physical space for storage, the cost of
transport, and the steep requirements for running one of these machines.  
Even if the RAM issue is easily solved, the power, cooling, weight, SSP,
licensing and software issues are tough.  I'm still hoping something can
be worked out.  It is estimated that there are enough parts (boards &
power supplies) to build four complete, fully-loaded systems by combining
the guts from all 13 machines.  At the very least, I'm desperate to try to
salvage at least four or five of the 13 chassis and all the boards and
power supplies.  While it would still be a shame to have those chassis
potentially scrapped, it would be absolutely criminal to have the contents 
of those machines destroyed.  So I'm trying to work out a deal of some 
kind.  If anyone is interested, contact me off-list and we can try again 
to rescue these cool machines.

-- Chris