HP/DEC/Compaq

Here, I have an 8 CPU (450Mhz PIII Xeons) compaq prototype server. I dont think this thing
was ever production.. It weighs damn near 130 pounds.



Heres the front, its got 4 hot swap sca drives, and a cd and floppy in the io module. And above, is the
CPU bank.



Here is the CPU/RAM bank pulled out, you can see the cpu's , and the ram module.



This is the back, with its cover slid, back. You can see the cooling tunnel, with several hot swap fans.
Also, there are quite a few 64Bit pci slots, labeled in different banks, and speeds. Under the fan tunnel, is the I/0 board, with keyboard, mouse, video, scsi etc..



And here from the back, you can see the PCI slots, fans, IO etc..
and the dual hot swap power supplies.



a side shot for scale.



Hehe, and just for kicks, heres my Octane's new desk!

Havent even fired this baby up yet, just got it inside, but I know it runs NT4 with lots of custom drivers.
I'm still trying to find the binder of cd's that came with it. I guess this baby was worth a hundred grand
when it was new. It was developed in conjunction with a software company, to run large mathematical models in excel.

Only Compaq engineers would think that was a good idea.

I'm sure that Microsoft sales would think so as well. Not so sure about MS engineering...

That looks pretty sick, cool seeing an 8 way old xeon system too.

hahaha, cant blame that one on compaq. My dads software company. Palisade Corp.
http://palisade.com/

They make a product called @RISK, a statistical ad in for excel, that does monte carlo simulation.
Very CPU intensive, and its used in a huge range of industries. Their customers use excel to build
their model, whatever it be (production line, oil field data, finance data, whatever) and the ad in runs ontop of excel.
I assume the fact that Excel is the defacto standard for number crunching in these industries decides that,
not the engineers. They make an SDK that is just the backend math libraries, and does not run on top of excel
im pretty sure.

There are quite a few Excel-based solvers in use in financial and other quantitative analysis - it's what "business" types are taught in school, and since accountants and analysts have always loved their spreadsheets, why not let their spreadsheets do the models for them?

Every time I see one of these Excel-based systems the engineer side of me laughs heartily, but then I think about it pragmatically and realize that that workflow was probably the most cost-effective solution for the problem at hand.

At any rate, that's an utterly ridiculous Compaq- I've never seen one that big. It's interesting that the company that collaborated on it wanted an 8-way system - generally Excel-based solvers tend to be singlethreaded/single-process even today, and I'm guessing even more so back then (of course, there's absolutely nothing keeping someone from writing a multithreaded solver in their language of choice and then hooking it into COM+IDispatch/VBA for Excel, I'm just interested as I haven't seen many even today). They must have been ahead of the curve.

So they don't actually run anything in excel? They only use the excel sheet as input.

And monte carlo is by nature easy to parallelize, so nothing strange with 8-way. I used to run monte carlo on a 40-something cpu openMosix cluster.

You appear to have nothing more then a loaded DL760. http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quic ... 3_div.html

You Dad probably meant it was a custom order compaq, and not a specially designed one off compaq.

ah! well thats nice to see that I might be able to find drivers for it... It says in that data sheet that it will run, Linux, Solaris, etc. I was under the impression I would get nothing but the special version of nt on it. I'm pretty sure when they got the machine, it was a year or so before the date on that datasheet. it has 8x 450mhz, its not even listed on the sheeet, lowest is 550mhz cpus. I still remember when compaq shipped it to em, I've been eyeing up this machine
since I was 12. It cost over a grand to ship, came in a rack with a 21 inch LCD panel that was worth some 3500 bucks at the time! Compaq took that back, but not their 100,000 dollar prototype! Before this single box unit, they
had some kind of rack that compaq had built that had just as many cpu's but in separate blade's. That took up most of a rack though.

Haha, so I guess their software has to run a copy of excel! Every iteration of a simulation that they run, it needs its own copy of excel running to pull numbers from! I seem to remember having many discussions with him about this, and how it limits their options for High performance computing. The people that really do a lot of work with their software, I guess they use PC's that are maxxxed out. They are able to run excel on multiple cores... but yes as many of you have mentioned, the overhead is large, and apparently theres no way around it, because the customers are accountants! not programmers..

Nice box we had one of those in the lab at my old job. Ran Linux with Xen, and a shitload of VMs on top of it. 8-way P3 Xeon (700MHz in our case, iirc) with 8GB of ram or so. Painfully loud though.

Yeah, I recognized the Nidec Beta fans. My 4D/380 VGX "predator" rack has the same

I used to love these things.... you could find them on ebay a few years ago for around $500 .. but the shipping would be close to 1000... But they make GREAT machines with that many cpu's... I ran Virtual Server on one, and SQL on another...

They make great machines to test parallel stuff on, but they are LOUD as hell...

These were great machines, but newstuff just needs something with more oomph then a P3... But these things kicked ass!!!!

One question.. how big's the cat?

It's a Proliant 8000 (or 8500). I had a couple of them at a previous job. They were the cat's meow in 1999/2000 - and yes, they were about $100K each.

IIRC, we ran Win2K Server on them. I don't remember their being any really exotic drivers, but there might have been a HAL disk to manage the 8-way procs.

If I recall, you required Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server to support 8-way systems.
How much power does that thing consume? It looks like something really cool to run but I would gather a smaller 4-way DL580 could outperform it.

The exotic thing is its chipset - the Intel Profusion, which AFAIK is the only "standard" Intel chipset capable of 8-way SMP operation. It was based on technology by Corollary (same people who did the 6-way IBM PC Server 720). Other Profusion servers were the IBM Netfinity 8500R and xSeries 370.

Some links:
Compaq 8-Way Multiprocessing Architecture
Profusion An 8-way Symmetric Multiprocessing Chipset
OPRF100 MP Board Set Technical Product Specification
Tuning IBM xSeries Servers for Performance

If this is a ProLiant 8500 prototype which I assume it is, back in 1999, when I was procuring Xeon processor options for these beasts on behalf of a Mega Bank here in UK I saved them I think £5K just by slightly reducing the cache size of the CPU's purchased on ONE machine!! (I think I purchased CPU's with 512K/1MB instead of 2MB cache, or 2MB instead of 4MB, can't remember now).

I think (in UKP) the price per processor difference was £1000 or so.

And I purchased 50....

50 x £5K...( 0.250 Million!!! at the time $400,000) saving... and didn't even get thanked ))) Nobody noticed!!!! not even the users I suspect..... I am not sure why I did this... possibly because I was bored that day ))))

The Bank ran server farms of 8500's in a custom built data centre. They were the big engines behind the bank at the time!