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CIRCLE WITH A DOT

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  3. Seventeen years ago!

Seventeen years ago!

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retrocomputingsunmicrosystemshomelab
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  • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

    Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

    (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

    #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

    fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF This user is from outside of this forum
    fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF This user is from outside of this forum
    fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net
    wrote last edited by
    #8

    @davefischer be careful, I'd gotten one of the first Sun E3000 (or was is the E3500?) for eval at France Telecom for use on our ISP Wanadoo. It caught fire in our office server room, fortunately rapidly extinguished. We went ahead with SGI Origins 2000 instead IIRC, though we did get a pair of Sun E10K later for our billing system.

    davefischer@hachyderm.ioD guardeddon@mas.toG 3 Replies Last reply
    0
    • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

      Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

      (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

      #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

      jbriancoyle@mas.toJ This user is from outside of this forum
      jbriancoyle@mas.toJ This user is from outside of this forum
      jbriancoyle@mas.to
      wrote last edited by
      #9

      @davefischer
      Since this is #RetroComputing - "Imagine a Beawolf cluster of those"!

      keithpjolley@discuss.systemsK 1 Reply Last reply
      0
      • R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topic
      • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

        Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

        (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

        #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

        galacticstone@mastodon.socialG This user is from outside of this forum
        galacticstone@mastodon.socialG This user is from outside of this forum
        galacticstone@mastodon.social
        wrote last edited by
        #10

        @davefischer I more interested in the collection of old band flyers (punk?) on the wall. Do you still have those?

        davefischer@hachyderm.ioD 1 Reply Last reply
        0
        • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

          Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

          (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

          #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

          rpardee@hachyderm.ioR This user is from outside of this forum
          rpardee@hachyderm.ioR This user is from outside of this forum
          rpardee@hachyderm.io
          wrote last edited by
          #11

          @davefischer "Your authority is not recognized in Fort Kickass" 😆

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          • fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net

            @davefischer be careful, I'd gotten one of the first Sun E3000 (or was is the E3500?) for eval at France Telecom for use on our ISP Wanadoo. It caught fire in our office server room, fortunately rapidly extinguished. We went ahead with SGI Origins 2000 instead IIRC, though we did get a pair of Sun E10K later for our billing system.

            davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
            davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
            davefischer@hachyderm.io
            wrote last edited by
            #12

            @fazalmajid

            "pair of Sun E10K" Lord those are big!

            fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF 1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • galacticstone@mastodon.socialG galacticstone@mastodon.social

              @davefischer I more interested in the collection of old band flyers (punk?) on the wall. Do you still have those?

              davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
              davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
              davefischer@hachyderm.io
              wrote last edited by
              #13

              @galacticstone

              Most of them? Rolled up or in a flatfile thingy. Most screenprinted by friends. The B&W pieces are by me. This was 2023:

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              • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

                Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

                (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

                #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

                ralfmaximus@mastodon.socialR This user is from outside of this forum
                ralfmaximus@mastodon.socialR This user is from outside of this forum
                ralfmaximus@mastodon.social
                wrote last edited by
                #14

                @davefischer

                Care to guess as to total FLOPS?

                davefischer@hachyderm.ioD 1 Reply Last reply
                0
                • fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net

                  @davefischer be careful, I'd gotten one of the first Sun E3000 (or was is the E3500?) for eval at France Telecom for use on our ISP Wanadoo. It caught fire in our office server room, fortunately rapidly extinguished. We went ahead with SGI Origins 2000 instead IIRC, though we did get a pair of Sun E10K later for our billing system.

                  guardeddon@mas.toG This user is from outside of this forum
                  guardeddon@mas.toG This user is from outside of this forum
                  guardeddon@mas.to
                  wrote last edited by
                  #15

                  @fazalmajid @davefischer
                  Mid-90s thru mid-00s worked for a service provider, everytime the Sun sales guys got wind of a new solution being built for a customer they were knocking on the door, ‘looks like a good fit for an E10K’. Rarely was it!

                  1 Reply Last reply
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                  • fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net

                    @davefischer be careful, I'd gotten one of the first Sun E3000 (or was is the E3500?) for eval at France Telecom for use on our ISP Wanadoo. It caught fire in our office server room, fortunately rapidly extinguished. We went ahead with SGI Origins 2000 instead IIRC, though we did get a pair of Sun E10K later for our billing system.

                    guardeddon@mas.toG This user is from outside of this forum
                    guardeddon@mas.toG This user is from outside of this forum
                    guardeddon@mas.to
                    wrote last edited by
                    #16

                    @fazalmajid @davefischer
                    Mid-90s thru mid-00s worked for a service provider, everytime the Sun sales guys got wind of a new solution being built for a customer they were knocking on the door, ‘looks like a good fit for an E10K’. Rarely was it!

                    1 Reply Last reply
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                    • ralfmaximus@mastodon.socialR ralfmaximus@mastodon.social

                      @davefischer

                      Care to guess as to total FLOPS?

                      davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
                      davefischer@hachyderm.ioD This user is from outside of this forum
                      davefischer@hachyderm.io
                      wrote last edited by
                      #17

                      @ralfmaximus

                      Ohhh... "peak theoretical" was around 11 gflops per maxxed-out unit, if I remember correctly? The original machines were around 2/3 maxxed. Around 60 gigaflops for the entire cluster?

                      1 Reply Last reply
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                      • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

                        @fazalmajid

                        "pair of Sun E10K" Lord those are big!

                        fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF This user is from outside of this forum
                        fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.netF This user is from outside of this forum
                        fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net
                        wrote last edited by
                        #18

                        @davefischer to run Portal Infranet billing software on Oracle, it was capable but also a resource hog.

                        1 Reply Last reply
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                        • jbriancoyle@mas.toJ jbriancoyle@mas.to

                          @davefischer
                          Since this is #RetroComputing - "Imagine a Beawolf cluster of those"!

                          keithpjolley@discuss.systemsK This user is from outside of this forum
                          keithpjolley@discuss.systemsK This user is from outside of this forum
                          keithpjolley@discuss.systems
                          wrote last edited by
                          #19

                          @JBrianCoyle @davefischer our cluster ran platform's lsf. mostly it was stuff like u60s but we had a row or two e450s and a handful of 4500s. every once in a while we'd need to use finance's 6800, 10k, or 15k, after we paid to max them out. we maxed out the CPUs in the enterprise servers so we could max out the memory and then run a single threaded job for weeks at a time praying nothing went wrong because it was the last step before going to market. this was for chip design.
                          we had a beowulf cluster, or two or three, as poc in lab on machines running linux but it never got put in production.

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                          • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

                            Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

                            (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

                            #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

                            A This user is from outside of this forum
                            A This user is from outside of this forum
                            agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
                            wrote last edited by
                            #20

                            @davefischer Back in the '90s my company went paperless. (Which generated 3x as much paper...) All on Sun workstations. They had them stacked up like cord wood. I figured they were about $10,000 each at the time, so seeing all those lovely things just piled up boggled my mind at how much they spent to go paperless. And that doesn't count the cost of the custom software for our shop floor.

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                            • davefischer@hachyderm.ioD davefischer@hachyderm.io

                              Seventeen years ago! I bought this multi-million dollar hoard of Sun servers from a scrap yard for $300. After testing, fixing, and swapping parts to max out some of them, I traded a couple for an SGI Onyx for the museum, a few more for parts of what eventually became my personal 16-proc Origin-2000, and kept two as compute servers for my film making.

                              (A maxxed-out E4000 has 14 x 400 Mhz UltraSparc II's, and 14 gig of ram (In 128meg sticks! Ha ha ha. Warm.)).

                              #RetroComputing #SunMicrosystems #HomeLab

                              masek@infosec.exchangeM This user is from outside of this forum
                              masek@infosec.exchangeM This user is from outside of this forum
                              masek@infosec.exchange
                              wrote last edited by
                              #21

                              @davefischer As former private owner of a functional E10K, I can admire that 😁

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