Multi-CPU Qbus VAXen

From: Alex White <meltie_at_meltie.com>
Date: Mon Oct 13 11:26:44 2003

On Friday 10 Oct 2003 6:04 pm, Steven M Jones wrote:
> Alex White wrote:
> > I've been planning a monster like this, 4 small backplanes mounted
> > in a hacked-around wide cabinet, 4 processors running as a VAXcluster
> > over Ethernet... Been done before?
>
> If you're running them as a LAVC (Local Area VAXCluster, used to be any
> cluster using Ethernet instead of CI) then this was done all the time
> and I'm sure still is. They probably haven't called them LAVC's for
> years and years, though.
>
> If you're saying you're going to interconnect the backplanes per the
> discussion here and in MicroNote #26, then if people did it it was a
> not a very common thing. And as others have pointed out, the normal
> OS candidates won't have support for it. That's not a reason to stop
> the project, just be aware of the necessary effort.
>
> --S.

I thought it too obvious a project for it not to have been done.

No, just four totally seperate 4-slot Q22 backplanes sharing a common PSU
(OK, i'm hardly going for 5x9 uptime and redundancy here!) in a largish
deskside case and clustered over thinwire - was going to look for KA660s
so I could share a DSSI disk too. Could multiple hosts use a SCSI bus?

Unfortunately the amount of VAXen (and therefore available CPUs) over here
in the UK is a LOT smaller than in the US!

alex/melt
Received on Mon Oct 13 2003 - 11:26:44 BST