SGI: Hardware

Seen on fleebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/271758384526

This thing has no less than 6 HIIPI serial cards installed. Why would you do that? I don't think you can use an O2K as a HIPPI router and one system in 6 different HIPPI networks seems a bit far fetched.

Few other interesting things too. The less-often-seen metal fascia, an IO6G and an IR1 jumper. Even with that (and six hippi cards), there's one too many zeros in the price tag.

j-j's right though, between the plethora of hippi ports and three node boards, makes you wonder if whoever sold or traded the O2k into the eBay seller decided to shoehorn in all their left over SGI hardware hoping it'd raise the value.

I like to look of the rack converted O2k. I have a spare CPU module and will get a rack with space to spare this weekend. A rack conversion kit would be nice.

Uhm, you need six HIPPI channels to balance the six Fibre Channel links?

I know this is a little late.

6 HIPPI-800Mbs cards, 2 ports each for duplex, could in theory be bonded together as 6x800=4800Mbs which would be smokin' fast for the Origin2Ks.

I am still maintaining some O2K racks running custom software. I have about 6 (i think still) of the HIPPI 24 slot switches for both serial fiber & parallel copper cards. We used them to interface with Cray XMP/YMP systems using hippi mode (not IP) and they were fast and dependable. The copper 30m cables weighed about 60 lbs if I remember right.

Over the years I have acquired some PCI-X HIPPI cards and tried in various systems to get them working with little success. Would love to do the same hippi-channel-bonding for Irix-to-Linux boxes but have still not been successful. (Gigabit bonding on Irix only works Irix-to-Irix.)

I have about 60TB of working space on my primary O2K and would love to move stuff to higher capacity linux archive boxes using a faster network. TG2 gigabit driver was fairly buggy and never really optimised. So, IN THEORY, hippi-bonding could be a great alternative if you already have tons of legacy hippi hardware lying around like I do.

Cheers.

Oops, just looked at card. They are single channel, however bonding logic still applies.

I have zero HIPPI experience but I'll toss out a couple ideas.

FIRST, production system, maybe with all the FC ports a file server. 3 point to point links to other systems, 1-2 cards for expansion when a few more point to point links are needed for the next couple machines, 1-2 cards for hot spares.

SECOND, SGI sales guy filled the XIO slots to get a bigger commission, customer needed 2 ports, should probably have some spare, maybe expansion, but I need to remodel my kitchen so fill 'er up.

Though I do like the idea of it being filled up with spares or parts from other systems as the herd thinned and this is the last one to finally leave and it has all the parts that were in the deployment.

SCNR

It has an IO6G installed but nobody has added in a modified video card. What was the point in that?

pentium wrote: It has an IO6G installed but nobody has added in a modified video card. What was the point in that?

Serial Ports!