Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997 | Hacker News Reader

Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997

cpushack.com

71 pointsstargrave26 comments

I was wondering why it had 6 CPUs (as opposed e.g. to 8). Seems that ALR did some clever engineering to work around a limitation in the chipset which was only designed for 4.

> 6x6 is based on the same 450GX chip set (previously known as Orion) as competitors' four-CPU offerings. The reason everyone else is shipping four-CPU systems is the chip set's 2-bit CPU addressing scheme -- allowing for four-CPU IDs. What ALR has done is implement two sets of three CPUs, where the missing fourth CPU in each set is actually a stand-in for the other entire group. The Pentium Pro's round-robin multitasking approach is preserved, and the four-CPU limit is broken.

[1] http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/gatewayalr9000/infoworld%2...

Of historical note is that more than 8 socket Opteron servers were implemented in similar way. There was an chip (IIRC called AMD Horus) that contained two HyperTransport/CoherentLink controllers connected back to back.

It's a standard approach to making bigger systems, as most built-in cache coherency protocols are optimized for a too-small case. AMD Horus allowed easy build of 8x8 servers, SGI continued their work from Altix in UltraViolet (now owned by HPE?) where they used custom cache coherency chips in between, implementing custom cache directory protocol over NUMAlink connections.

Also, the approach of having "router" and "local area switch" is used in Infiniband, where local subnets use 16bit ID for endpoints, and 128bit addresses for inter-subnet routing (the addresses are IPv6 compatible).

ALR!!! I hadn't heard that name in eons. Didn't even know they were still extant in 1997. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were selling some of the beefiest professional-grade x86 hardware -- workstations and servers -- around. They were among the first (besides Compaq) to ship 386 and 486 hardware and early on the EISA bandwagon too.

They were \absorbed by Gateway(?!!) at some point there. I remember having to call them for support on one of these monsters a few times in '98 or so.

I'm shure alot of you have seen this already. If not, it's an entertaining 45 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk (Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)

Crazy how these things depreciate to basically zero monetary value over time. Compare that to say, the convenience store on my corner, which is largely unchanged since the 1970s.

Pretty sure the value is negative. You couldn't just throw them in the trash, you'd have to pay someone to take them. 350 nm process, which has gone down almost a factor of 100 by now (apparently 3nm is in prototype), and that's a linear measurement so it's really more like 10,000. Stunning. A silicon atom is about .1 nm in diameter, so a factor of 10 is about it for physical shrinking, definitely not a factor of 100. I hope that we'll be sitting here in 20 years amazed that petaflop computers drew megawatts of power!

What is interesting though, computer hardware from 2007 did not depreciate as much and probably would still be usable in 2030. I mean, I am sure you will be able to install Linux Mint or similar, and still use it.

When one of my employers closed our site and merged operations with our Chicago office at the end of 2001, we were left with surplus equipment. Nobody wanted about 4 giant quad-PPro servers, so I took them. I never did anything with them and honestly don't remember who made them..we were mainly an HP shop, so maybe? They sat on rollers on the floor, and came up to about the bottom of a desktop, and were square boxes maybe 2 ft on a side. I think they may still be holding up a table at my father's office...

Well you have quite the dilemma.

On one hand, they are pieces of vintage hardware.

On the other hand, you may have about 5 grams of gold holding up your father's table (up to .33g/cpu*16).

I suppose they could take out just the CPUs for the gold and leave the rest to hold up the tables.

but then you don't have a golden table stand

Sounds kinda like the HP Netserver LX Pro I had a long time ago (I finally got rid of it ~15 years ago when moving).

There's a reason that beast had heavy-duty caster wheels -- fully decked out with 12 SCSI HDDs installed, that thing weighed around ~200 pounds (90 kg)!

I found an old forum post [0] which includes some pictures of the machine.

(I had an LH Pro too. It was also a helluva machine, but paled in comparison to the LX Pro!)

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EDIT: I found a copy of an old HP configuration / spec sheet [1] for an LX Pro (dated 19 Aug 1996) that includes pricing information. The as-configured price? USD $645,663!

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[0]: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?40511-HP-Netserver...

[1]: http://c970058.r58.cf2.rackcdn.com/individual_results/HP/hp....

This is almost the right era to say "imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!"

Cool, but why the hell would you want to install Windows Vista on it?

I haven't kept up with the ALR 6x6 movement since 2002-03 but a the time only Windows (NT AFAICR) would properly utilize all six of the cores. That may still be the case.

I remember seeing ads for these in an old Byte magazine. ALR had some high end stuff...

Probably not vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown either.

Uses Pentium Pros -- the first Intel CPUs to be vulnerable.

In that case, I wonder what the chances are for getting a BIOS update?

Dammit, Intel!

Does it run linux?

According to the article, it doesn't (not that it couldn't): Studying such computational supermachines, I decided to dwell on systems consisting of Pentium Pro processors, so by installing Windows compatible applications and benchmarks, one could see how much the performance went ahead over the decades.

Mini-Mainframe? Isn't that a minicomputer? Am I missing something?

Just a small computer with the computational power of a full-size mainframe. (Jargon may confuse, I know.)

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