The collected works of bluecode - Page 3

According to the doc the Red system only runs up to 1.28GHz. The Silver runs up to 1.6. Also according to the doc the CPUs in the SB2500 are IIIi not III.

Dual 1.28s are really not bad. I have a bunch of V210 with 2 x 1.34 and they move right along. Look at it this way, you're probably protected against overheating since your CPUs are rated at 1.5 and you're only running them at 1.28. The 1.5s throw an awful lot of heat even compared to the 1.34. Consider it free frequency scaling

I mean for a SPARC box, it's fast enough for what it's for.


I would rather run S10 on a Sun Blade than Ubuntu on the fastest laptop in the world. YMMV


I'd like to see Miod (forum member and OpenBSD developer) port IRIX to the Lemote Fuloong. I imagine I would like AIX also but have no POWER gear.

Interesting. There aren't a lot of SPARC emulators around but I stumbled across this today right before I saw your post.

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~agupta/ ... simulator/

qemu-system-sparc (V8) is good enough to run OpenBSD for weeks on end and even rebuild the entire system from source which takes weeks on a fairly fast OpenBSD Intel host. But last I heard the 64 bit version is not ready for prime time.

DOH!!! I forgot about that. I really need to get some SGI gear.



That part I'm painfully aware of. I use my Mini headless. Any hope for an accelerated framebuffer in the near future?

Can't you just get into OBP and do



?

I saw that one a while ago. It looks neat, but I'd like to find a modern (V9+) emulator that would build and run anywhere since actual V9 boxes are not that fun to run in the same room as you're working

If the table is chipboard then surely the machine is light enough to take it off while you're working? Usually the manufacturer supplies g-ratings for shock, but I think they're only for operating conditions. After that you have to get a physicist and a mathematician and a materials engineer and a machinist to answer your question.

I would be more concerned about the wood chips and dust then I would about drilling, with the machine turned off. Or, if the machine is heavy and the table is not very strong, you should worry about vibrations from the machine itself while it is running, or the machine breaking the table. So many issues, so little time!

I have to check my calendar to see if today is April 1st

Thanks, I laughed, I cried! Two thumbs up!

Sorry but that is a ridiculous "solution" when the obvious answer is to buy more Sun servers

Minerals In Peoples' Sandwiches

^^

This ought to be stickied somewhere.

That's what popped into my mind. Just say "no" to bastardizing vintage hardware.

Doubles as an art-deco office trash can?

I think Solaris will be around on high-end SPARC boxes a little while longer since there's a hell of a lot of money and maybe some ego tied up in SPARC (and that's some seriously GOOD hardware) but Linux is cheap and popular on x86. I guess Larry doesn't need the money from the Solaris ecosystem but it does help him sell Oracle DB and probably a bunch of app software.



I don't agree with this. VMS has been around longer than a lot of other OS open or closed. A few friends that have worked on it tell me it offers features the competition didn't and people and companies wouldn't have paid money for it all these years if they could get the features important to them for nothing. Any VMS customers on the forum here? I thought they did get the source when they changed the name to OpenVMS. Anyway it's not about open or closed but how good and marketable stuff is whether it's safe to use. Personally I work on a closed OS and hardware platform that's been around since 1964 and it's still a zillion dollar a year industry and nobody got screwed for using it. How long does something have to be in service before your "can be discontinued at any time" becomes irrelevant? How many new companies last more than a couple of years? How many companies started and went out of business since VMS 1.0 in 1978 and today?

If somebody is worried the vendor will go out of business they can write into the contract that they have to escrow the source. We have escrowed source more than once.

Just because something is open source doesn't mean companies will use it or pay money for it or should pay money for it. And it doesn't mean they can maintain it if the people they're relying on go out of business. If RedHat goes out of business does it really help the companies using RHEL and paying for service contracts that they could hire their own people to support it? It's usually not viable and most companies don't want to be in the IT business which is how this all started to begin with. A lot of people seem to think Linux is the answer to any question. Come back and talk to us when Linux has been in use in commercial/industrial settings as long as VMS and then we'll listen a little more. Until then...



No, if HP wanted to succeed with VMS they could have accomplished it without open sourcing it. They have the resources to do it. For most big companies business is just business and when Oracle bought Sun and got what they wanted it doesn't matter now to them if Solaris goes away, the Sun purchase already paid for itself. The same thing with VMS. It's too small a business for HP to worry about or they would have supported it better. They got the few sales and all the support contracts and it's paid for itself already.

Bottom line is today cheap is what matters. Personally, I remember the days when companies spent whatever it took to get the best stuff. Now everybody wants the cheapest stuff and it really doesn't matter if it's good bad or indifferent, as long as it doesn't make them bleed red on the next quarterly statement. In that kind of world good is hard to come by.

A real 3278 is a dream to code from. The visibility is tops and so is the keyboard.

One time I saw somebody writing COBOL in an emulator with colors set on and I almost needed to heave. I don't understand how people can tolerate the visual noise level but I guess the new generation is used to colors and flashing lights etc. When I code in x3270 it is alway set to work as much as possible in green screen mode. It's a nice emulator and works very well.

Fascinating. What a dream job (guaranteed job security) for one lucky guy. Problem is, anybody good enough at PDP-11 stuff is probably not going to want to work for another 37 years.

Depends on what you're coding what editor what language, etc. In the case I'm talking about there is no smart editor and the coloring just hurts your eyes. The guy just couldn't live without garish colors whether they helped or not I guess because his previous 2 months on the job were using Netbeans and Java. I don't think anybody needs COBOL colorized.

I'm not opposed to Emacs style colorization of source on a white background and I agree it is helpful. I like the autoindent more than the coloring. I still get a thrill when I don't have to set tabs or space stuff out manually. A lot of people call me old fashioned. And I also don't use spellcheckers. Go firgue!
(yeah, on purpose)

Nice pic! That is actually the keyboard for the operator's console not the one coders use but I believe it's the same housing. Steel, and heavy! When men were men and nobody knew what aluminum was...

You can get a filtered airgun for use with a regular compressor (guys at bodyshops use these all the time so they don't ruin an expensive paint job) but I don't know how much you'll have to spend to get one that is safe to use on computer guts.

Is this the 2U Origin 350? I've been wanting one of those but can't afford to ship it most likely.

Well don't throw it out until I get enough money to pay for the shipping! OpenBSD ought to run nicely on it.

How does keeping it in a server room mean you don't have to pay for power/airco bill and the server room? I want a server room like that!

Yeah but this is a borderline nutcase/Luddite view and aside from you and me there are obviously not enough people who subscribe to it. Time goes on whether we like it or not. Running antique (cough) vintage (cough) hardware and software is just a temporary respite. When you get up from your chair you have to face the world moved on from there. Not for the better but there's no stopping it.

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily" -- Bluto ... and then in the secret meeting of the Greek Counsel "Blowjob! Blowjob!"

Not only did we (who were there) get along fine back then we also had jobs that mostly weren't getting "outsourced" or "downsized" or "rightsized" or "reorganized" or "restructured" or "nearshored". I don't even know what the latest word for that is but I do remember what it was like to smoke cigars and drink beer in the office- during working hours- and still get a bonus at the end of the year. It was nice to work with the same guys for a few years instead of shaking hands with the consultant-du-jour or moving offices twice a year during the acquisitions that came later. It was nice to be able to ask questions of people who worked on a product for 20 years how things ought to be done.



Well I think we can all bet money HP didn't buy Compaq for VMS. They wanted the PC business and they got it. Companies today really don't want crappy little 100M/year business lines cluttering up the financials. If it doesn't make half a billion it's probably going to die in a big merger or acquisition. It has nothing to do with how good something is or how much people love it. They don't want to manage it.

Do you have a cite for that Stroustrup quote btw? I've read quite a few statements by him that suggest he knows which end is up notwithstanding the fact he invented C++.

Yes, they used to be prime stuff. At some point they transitioned to the world of commodity crapware.

I love the paneling and flooring. Beautiful!

An Ultra 80 has 4 processors? When the hell did this happen?! That's awesome!

Just be glad you're not living in a van down by the river.

What's up with these pics? Is there some news the rest of the world hasn't heard about? Or was this some social consciousness thing...

I agree with that. What I hard find to explain is how few other people do. But in the end it doesn't matter what we think because the majority rules. The sheeple have spoken! Or at least their unelected governing bodies have...




Thanks. But I don't understand what you meant in your sentence above. I find his comments refreshingly accurate. It's even more remarkable that an academic is connected to reality. That alone is noteworty!

Will OpenVMS run on those?

It depends. Increasingly in the UNIX world things seem to be moving in the direction you're going. A lot of the modern parallelism stuff is aimed at making it easy to get the advantages of multiple cores and threads automagically without the race conditions and other issues. But this trades off efficiency, performance, and control for "safety" and is almost never the best solution from a design or performance point of view. The best way to use multiple processors depends on a lot of stuff including the hardware, the OS, the APIs, and in many cases it depends heavily on the application and what it is doing. There is the issue of how one application fits into the OS and shares resources with other applications and the OS itself. But there is also the issue of what the app is designed to do, and how it can best be organized to do that. That is not something the OS or these new APIs can do. It depends on having fairly low-level access to stuff like controlling serialization directly,resource managing {threads|tasks|processes|memory} etc.

In practice the "it's not the application's job" and "let the OS do it" approach devolves to a "throw more hardware at the problem" approach since it removes control from the very place where the issues are most understood- the resource consumer. This is a separate issue from the fact many/most coders are unskilled and shouldn't be coding.

I think your comment is too general on one hand and too UNIX-specific on the other. There are other (older) paradigms which have been working just fine in alternative universes, and they involve letting the application designer/coder set up his program in the best way possible and then the OS allocates resources when available. The same program can run on a uniprocessor box or a multiprocessor box without changes. It just usually runs a lot better on a multiprocessor box, up to a point where even throwing more threads|tasks etc. at the problem don't help.

Just looked at your webpage. Very nice layout and very interesting stuff! Nice job!

Well Hamei this looks like a conversation we could have over a pitcher or three of beer. I agree with everything you said. Your post reminded me there's a lot I am dissapointed with in the direction parallelism support is going but it's because of what we said: most desktop software is crap and written by people who can't code their way out of a paper bag. And UNIX falls far short of my desires but it's the best commonly available option and the price is right. So we're kind of stuck with it until who knows when.

The race conditions and buffer overflows never seem to end. The response to this is to take control away from the application and give it to more and more layers. Look at Fortran which can be considered a leading language for HPC. They have changed the language dramatically in the last few standards going from a language that wasn't useful for much more than calculations without vendor extensions(no pointers, no dynamic storage management) to a language with a lot of nice features that's becoming generally useful. But they left out tasking control completely in favor of external solutions like OpenMP. Could we hope for native threads like PL/I has had since the 1970s and Ada had since 1983? If not, could we hope for a POSIX thread interface? No! My reaction to your post was more about this kind of stuff than actually worrying about the number of cores/threads. I believe in giving the application designer as much control as possible over managing resources because that enables the best possible design for that specific application. After that it becomes the OS' job to make sure the applications live together harmoniously which is something most OS don't seem particularly good at.

There are things only the application knows so doing all this stuff at a higher/lower level is never going to solve the fundamental problem. A good simple example is an email client. Most people have multiple email accounts but most (all?) email clients fetch mail serially and most of them lock the UI while the mail is being fetched. This is obviously the easy, "safe" way to write an email client because serialization is hard. But there's no reason there couldn't be a UI thread so the UI stays unlocked and you could compose and search and read mail while you're fetching from *all* the mail servers in parallel. It's just that nobody did this (AFAIK). No OS is intelligent enough to split up this work into meaningful logical components. I was not involved but I worked next to a group that did a lot of work and had some success on parallelizing big workloads. It's very difficult to do from outside and there is a limit to how much this can ever work, and that's why it always degenerates to throwing more hardware at the problem. They did a good enough job to make money with their solution but only the people designing the workload have a complete understanding (ok, if they're competent, which is not a given) of what can be parallelized and what can't. The external parallelizing layers and tools aren't a real solution. They're just a po-man's way of getting an extra bump for not much effort. People have to buy more and more hardware to keep up with lamer and lamer software.

Yes, of course. BTW I'm far from an expert on this stuff but I don't see any difference in your two printouts. Did I miss something?
The interfaces already have ip addresses assigned. What isn't working?

If you're using dhcp I think it's something like



But that doesn't seem like it's the problem because the interfaces have ip addresses.

Click the button and it will never pop up again

Haha I get it now. I saw the running or not, I meant between the two screenshots no difference. Ok. I'll get back to you in a few hours if nobody else does. I actually get along pretty well with Solaris. It's just that I can't keep all the different commands straight between the OS I have running over here. I'll have to bring up a box and try it. I'm not running all the machines I usually run because all my UPS batteries are now dead

If this happens again try

ifconfig interface plumb up
ifconfig interface ipaddress

The only time I have seen NICs go away like that is on Winblows multiboots since Winbloze often disables NICs for power saving and then the other OS can't use it. Thankfully this can't be the case because there is no SPARC Winbloze AFAIK

Is this a NIC you installed or is it original equipment? It sounds like something is definitely wrong if only a reboot brings it back up(indicating needing a POR?)

I never used a Cray so I don't know, but this statement just sounds wrong. For one thing, there is no contradiction between an operating system that only runs one program at a time [if that was ever accurate about Cray] and multitasking. One program can certainly multitask- this is how we do things on IBM. When there are multiprocessors we get the advantage of them, it not we still get the advantage of correct division of work and the advantage of having more workunits available for dispatching among all work on the system. This was something I alluded to earlier in the thread.

I did a quick search and I saw a document from 1986 on the CFT77 Compiler which says "CFT77 is a multipass, optimizing, vectorizing, and multitasking compiler.." See here:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Cray/Cray.CFT77.1986.102646186.pdf

This page http://www.ecmwf.int/services/computing/overview/supercomputer_history.html also briefly documents their use of multitasking on a Cray in 1984.

IBM mainframes have had multitasking support in hardware and software from the beginning or shortly thereafter in S/360 (I can point you to doc from 1965 verifying this) and they were never considered supercomputers, so surely Cray had multitasking support or what was the point of those multiprocessors?

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