On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Nate 'Dr. Octagon' Gelbard wrote:

> We have recently purchased a Meiko CS-2 transputer from an 
> OSU auction. more info is here http://www.grawk.net/~gelbardn/shark
> but its basically an array of 16 sparc-10 2-proc machines.
> 
	Sounds interesting :)

> The management node is a dual TMS-390z55 w/ 32mb of ram, and a cgsix.
> It boots into OpenProm v2.8.128. A 1 gig scsi HD is attached via
> the an NCR sbus scsi controller.
> 
	Does it have an ethernet interface over which you could also boot?

	I'd be inclined to try to load the NetBSD/sparc boot program
	first. If it runs OpenPROM you may be able to 'Just Boot'
	NetBSD/sparc on the scalar node.

> The other nodes (vector nodes) are basically the same machine, but 
> w/ 2 extra vector Fujitsu uMP vector processors. From the serial console,
> 
> *** HyperSPARC Vindaloo Vrom 4.1 [08-Dec-93] ***
> 
> ?           candis      dlfile      dlstat      dm          ecc 
> echo        fakedl      go          led         mprobe      peek 
> pil         poke        port        quit        reset       sidsum         
> tm version                                               
> 
> It seems that I can dlfile via the serial connection, and 'go' to
> jump to 0x000000000
> 
> Would the kernel be the file i should upload? Or do I need some sort
> of bootstrap first?
> 
	This is the method for booting the additional nodes?

> Has anyone every seen one of these machines? We're missing the
> disk set from the management console (hacked solaris 2.4). I'm
> more interested as running these an indiviual sparc-10 machines
> rather than use the elan backplane (40mb/sec between machines),
> and use the ethernet for any parallel fun we do.
> 
	That sounds feasible - have you tried tracking down any hardware
	docs on it?

> I would eventually like to open these machines up to the opensource
> development community for sparc/SMP work, or any other projects.

	Excellent plan :)	


		David/absolute