John Bowden wrote:
Sorry to hijack this thread. I have got some old Sparc station 5's any one know of an o/s that I can install on them. I would like to learn all about clustering
SS5 or Sun Ultra 5 ?
the SS5 is way WAY old (discontinued in 1996), 70Mhz and used oddball memory, 8 x 8MB (64MB total) or 8 x 32MB (256MB total maximum), and used SBus peripherals, you'd be better off with pentium-II systems. clusters generally need multiple network adapters at the very least.
The Ultra 5 is somewhat newer, with a 270-400MHz ultrasparc IIi and support for up to 512MB ram,, but was penalized (heavily!) by using a programmed IO IDE channel controller (no DMA). It also requires nonstandard RAM (EDO DRAM with ECC in a 168 pin jedec form factor), very hard to find.
anyways, I think you'd have better luck trying to bring up a test cluster using old x86 PCs.