Tag: e6500
Sun at Home
by Alex on Jul.20, 2008, under Tinkergeek
In a move that may be quite unwise, I obtained a Sun Enterprise 6500 system and put it in my basement. I’m not exactly sure why I made such a decision, but the hardware has been interesting to play with.
The system was billed as the ultimate Enterprise system of the time, featuring massive expansion capabilities and maximum uptimes. The system was engineered to be hot swappable so one could repair or upgrade without trouble. Normally, the system came in a rack by itself with a little bit of room to add near line storage to it. Purdue used several of these systems in various departments, including the mail group where my machine came from. Although, my system does not sit in the large, purple-ish colored rack. Instead, it was pulled out and now sits on a shelf humming away.
The rack required a 30amp 208v plug, the system rated at taking upto 24amps of that power. On the advice of a coworker, the system is powered from a 15amp 120v circuit. Of course, most of the system is bare. My system is configured with the standard I/O board so I can boot from either a wide scsi disk or a CD-rom and four 400MHz CPU boards. The system contains 14GB of memory. The chassis can hold 16 boards, 15 of which can hold CPUs and memory. Making the system able to contain upto 30 487MHz UltraSparcII’s and 60GB of memory.
Thankfully, it doesn’t appear the computer is consuming too much power (as the lights don’t yet dim when I turn it on…)
I just got Debian Etch installed and serving up a 7GB ram disk over NFS to my iMac. Sadly, the system only comes with 100Mbps Ethernet, with only two expensive options for 1Gbps: a rare SBus adapter or the PCI I/O board. The system backplane is capable of 2.8GBps of traffic, so hopefully one day I can obtain the PCI board.
Since I’ve been playing with my employer’s SiCortex machine, I decided to run my PI estimation program against this beast. On a per-core basis, the code runs at about the same speed on both systems. Though, I’m guessing my system is using a few more watts than the equivalent 8 cores in a SiCortex…
