Nekochan Net

I have been in Tokyo this week on business and I was with Fujitsu this morning. In the lobby of the corporate building they had a very nice display of the Prime FX10 Supercomputer. The cooling is immense, very impressive. Will upload some pictures. Also great view of Mt. Fuji from top floor..

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/ ... /primehpc/

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I'm not into what passes for a "supercomputer" these days but that one is notable for being one of the very few using SPARC CPUs. It is nice that Fujitsu are committed to SPARC and too bad their boxes aren't more plentiful/cheap.

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Paint It Blue

It's good to see *someone*'s committed to SPARC (Snoracle certainly isn't).

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smit happens.

bigred, 700MHz R16K, 2GB RAM, V12, 6.5.30
indy, 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
probably posted from bruce, 2x2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 8GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

Any last outposts of alternative architectures in this era of creeping x86/ARM duoculture are worthy of my respect.

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Amiga 1200 (KS3.1/ClassicWB3.1, 4GB HD, 34MB RAM, 68030 @ 50MHz)
DEC VAXStation 4000/60 (OpenVMS 7.3, 9GB HD, 104MB RAM, KA46 @ 55MHz)
DEC MicroPDP-11/73 (RT-11, 32MB HD, 4MB RAM, KDJ11 @ 15MHz)
"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup

I like SPARC, though the register windows rapidly proved the wrong way to go (everybody else went the other way). If there's going to be an alternative, it's going to either be MIPS or POWER, because they're really all that's left except for small cores like Blackfin.

That said, I just pulled the trigger on a 3G Samsung ARM Chromebook. Better than buying Intel.

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smit happens.

bigred, 700MHz R16K, 2GB RAM, V12, 6.5.30
indy, 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
probably posted from bruce, 2x2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 8GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

A photo

amazing plumbing

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view from 20th floor

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This looks really cool

Do you have any pictures of the boards inside?

no, I did look but this was all that was on public display.

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You're the guy running NT on Alpha, aren't you?

Then no.

In all seriousness, pick an architecture you like and run it. There's nothing new under the Sun. Old stuff is usually better. Except Intel

How many people actually have any interaction with the hardware? UNIX boxes are 99% C and the rest is assembly wrapped in C. Most UNIX and Windows programmers are completely isolated from the box they're coding on. The API is the machine. Does it really matter what the architecture is as long as it performs as you want?

There are a lot of nice emulators around in case you like hardware you can't get for some reason.

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Paint It Blue

Isn't it always a sign of a "serious computer" when installing it requires a plumber?

It must have been awesome to see in person. Thanks for posting the pic!

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Sun SPARCstation 20, Blade 2500
HP C8000

And running VMS on VAX...and RT-11 on PDP-11...and Kickstart/Workbench 3.1 on Amiga...there's room for variety, is what I'm saying.


The API is not the machine, because you take the machine away and the API is just a collection of theory. Hardware will always matter because without it software is irrelevant. (Besides which, even in the RISC world architectures differ significantly in performance characteristics for different applications.) The idea that we've reached (or will reach) some kind of transcendent state wherein software runs in an ethereal realm of Pure Computation where the concerns of the physical processor world cannot touch it is futurist silliness.

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Amiga 1200 (KS3.1/ClassicWB3.1, 4GB HD, 34MB RAM, 68030 @ 50MHz)
DEC VAXStation 4000/60 (OpenVMS 7.3, 9GB HD, 104MB RAM, KA46 @ 55MHz)
DEC MicroPDP-11/73 (RT-11, 32MB HD, 4MB RAM, KDJ11 @ 15MHz)
"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup

Nothing new here ... in our entire world, reality has no influence on the wackoffmeisters in control.

Don't get me started, man.

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Amiga 1200 (KS3.1/ClassicWB3.1, 4GB HD, 34MB RAM, 68030 @ 50MHz)
DEC VAXStation 4000/60 (OpenVMS 7.3, 9GB HD, 104MB RAM, KA46 @ 55MHz)
DEC MicroPDP-11/73 (RT-11, 32MB HD, 4MB RAM, KDJ11 @ 15MHz)
"'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling." - Bjarne Stroustrup

To head back towards the subject ...

Speaking of futurist fantasy wackoffmeisters, it's kind of funny. Since about 1980 they have all been castigating Japan for a "lack of growth ! stagnation ! what will they do when the older generation retires ?" and other conventional-wisdom bullshit.

Meanwhile, the oracles in the west put all their eggs into the finance basket.

Japan is now doing fine, about the same as they have for the past two thousand years, while the US is bankrupt and inflating its money to weimar heights in order to pretend that their retarded ponzi scheme was a viable way to live.

Japan and probably Fujitsu will still be around in another hundred years.