[Info-vax] The Future of Server Hardware?

[Paul Sture]

In article <k4dflb$jr9$1 at pcls6.std.com>,
 moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) wrote:

> David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
> 
> >Weren't racks of a "gazillion" DS10Ls a good solution for some problems? 
> >  It seems that plenty of them were made and sold.
> 
> >Perhaps there are some applications better suited to many processors 
> >than to just one or a few large processors ...
> 
> Almost anything that needs a lot of things done in parallel.  I do know
> weather models and movie animation are two such things.
> 
> David Turner of Islandco got a hold of a whole bunch of DS10Ls, probably
> from such a project that wound down. He sold them cheap and even gave
> some away.  I wonder what project they may have been used for.

IIRC a fleet of DS10Ls was used in the production of Titanic, using some 
form of Linux.

> Similarly, someone on Ebay got a hold of a zillion rx2600 Itanics (2U
> boxes), and was selling them for a long time.  I bought one of them.  I
> also wonder what project they came from.  (I do know they were running
> some sort of Linux and not VMS from the boot configuration)

I saw some early ones emerge from SGI, but I don't think they were VMS 
capable.  Whether they were scrapping a project or moving onto later 
models was unknown.

-- 
Paul Sture