On August 3, Will Jennings wrote:
> No, Apple Network Servers run AIX... They're from the days when IBM,
> Motorola, and Apple worked so closely on the PowerPC that the Apple Network
> Servers really did run AIX...
Oh, neat! I never knew that.
> Anyways, the front ends for Cray's, at least
> in the 80's, were VAXen, DEC had a deal with Cray to sell VAXen specifically
> as Cray front-ends. I gave all my Systems and Options catalogs away, but
> some of them did have the VAX front-end systems in them...
Are we talking about front-ends, or console processors? Earlier,
Heinz made mention of the SPARC5 doing NFS...that's the console
processor of a J90.
Earlier Crays run as attached processors with front-end computers.
The job runs on the front-end and it ships data to and from the
backend at high speed as needed...users didn't "log into" the Cray
directly. Today's Crays (and indeed going back about fifteen years or
so) run Unicos (a Unix variant) which is a direct-login system...so
there's no "front-end" in the old sense of the word. They do,
however, use console processors...in the case of the J90, it's an
unmodified Sun SPARC5 computer running Solaris (usually 2.4) which
handles console operations. It communicates with another SPARC5...a
VME64 board in the IOS card cage that netboots a special chunk of code
(i.e. not SunOS or Solaris) that handles diags, initialization,
booting, and runtime I/O for the Cray processor(s). Most Crays can
have multiples of these systems, called IOSs.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD
Received on Fri Aug 03 2001 - 19:22:20 BST