[CentOS] Sparc

Mon Jul 9 21:41:04 UTC 2007
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

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.