Quad G4 Boards

su-geek writes " Synergy Microsystems offers QUAD G4 boards as well as QUAD G3 boards which all run SMP linux. Not only that but you can add more than one board to the dual PCI backplane." I didn't find any evidence of running Linux, and they don't appear to be motherboards: they look like addons, but still, they look nifty. I want a couple CPUs dedicated to running OpenGL screensavers in my root window or something.

Comments

VMElinux

[NevDull]

For those of you who want to know more about how to go about putting together a working system with Linux and VMEbus components, see www.vmelinux.org.

From their site:
This project's primary offering is the Kernel Level Linux Device Driver that interfaces between the Unix Shell environment and the VMEbus. The driver is compatible with the Tundra Universe PCI-VME bridge integrated circuit.

Re:VMElinux

[Anonymous Coward]

There is IMHO a much better system for VME accesses under Linux at ftp:://vlab1.iram.es/pub/, this driver allows you to write board specific device drivers which can be loaded as kernel modules and handle VME interrupts in the kernel, queue DMA operations, etc. Several research institutes are already using it, some for fairly complex data acquisition tasks.

Note that there are other manufacturers who have announced quad G4 VME or CompactPCI boards: CETIA, Force Computers, and perhaps others.

VME and CompactPCI boards are more expensive but hey, you pay for the high reliability and hot plugging capability given by the indirect connectors, the fact that you can put many more boards on a single backplane (9 for CompactPCI, 21 for VME), the capability to operate in severe environments (whether temperature, vibration, acceleration, orientation, dust, etc), in some cases the warranty (5 years for Motorola VME boards), and many other details which are not required in desktop systems whose main design goal is planned obsolescence.

Those are not PC's, those are industrial SBC's

[fbrehm]

Those things don't look like motherboards because they aren't. The VME and CompactPCI bus are industrial grade busses. The Synergy Micro boards are "Single Board Computers" that plug into a bus and control the boards that plug into other slots of the bus. These other boards can be anything from digital I/O for controlling machines, to video interfaces for machine vision applications. These systems go into applications for which your desktop PC (or Mac) would quickly fail. For example, my company is bidding on a project with a requirement that the boards in a CompactPCI (or is it VME, I forgot) withstand accelerations of 20G AND be able to survive being cleaned with a fire hose!

Re:Those are not PC's, those are industrial SBC's

[zorgon]

heheheh, I got a feeling that's not your room.

Re:Those are not PC's, those are industrial SBC's

[zorgon]

Sorry: couldn't resist. ;) I do however think that getting decent computers that you can run outside in less than decent conditions is going to be a Big Thing. Like where I live, relative humidity rarely dips below 90%, salt spray is ubiquitous, and electronic componentss in non-air-conditioned areas last about, oh, a year if you use'm every day to dry them out. I'd want a nitrogen-packed, o-ring sealed computer even if I didn't take it outside. Good luck with the car.

Re:Whoa...

[Signail11]

The G4 is not considered a supercomputer. I have no idea where you get that from; the current High Performance Computing export restriction thresholds are considerably higher the sustained MTOPS that the G4 can acheive. I recommend checking out the Cox Report and "High-Performance Computing, National Security Applications, and Export Control Policy at the Close of the 20 th Century" (Goodman, Wolcott, Homer) for more information. Not that this matters much, considering that every nuclear weapon currently in service was designed on a computer with less power than the average desktop Pentium 2, Athlon, or G4...

Re:Cheap PowerPC machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for an older Mac from a used hardware resller or an auction house (i.e. eBay). If you decide to pick up a Mac make sure it's a PPC box with a PCI bus.. The 6100's, and a couple other models, use nubus rather than PCI which will force you to use MkLinux.

There are other PowerPC machines either available or under development. Check out this link for a few of the POP efforts out there...

Personally, I've been looking at the quad 604e/G3/G4 PCI cards from Total Impact for a while now. They're expensive! However, they aren't single board computers. They sit in a PCI slot in your Mac/PC and act as additional processors. Total Impact announced a LinuxPPC based server box (they don't have much info on their site about it) using up to 13 internal G4 processors and scalable using an additional backplane...

Re:Whoa...

[seebs]

I know where he got it: Apple ads.

OT - SMP will barely help at all.

[Microlith]

Q2 itself may not be tweaked for SMP but if a PMesa enabled graphics driver is rendering, the rendering process is distributed! Sure, all the Q2 data itself still stays on the first CPU, but at least the REAL hardcore CPU hog, the rendering, is going out to those other CPU's.

Only if you do software rendering. Otherwise 90% of the rendering is done on the graphics card. You might say geometry calculations need to be moved there, but that will only help minimally, and that is being moved to the graphics card also.

SMP will not be a commonplace feature. Not everyone will use it, so the game companies will not take much advantage of it. Without game support, SMP is useless, and SMP based PMesa drivers are just as useless.

NOT a PC... Not cheap!

[eriks]

I dunno about these days, but last time I checked to support a VME backplane, you're looking at like 100-200 grand ... these are for high-demand industrial applications. Of course I want one anyway :)

This stuff is usually MilSpec, i.e. can deal with extremely harsh environments and keep functioning. They used to blow up one (or two) of these for testing nukes and other stupid stuff like that.

What it is and why Linux won't run on it.

[RISCy Business]

Okay, first off, what is it?

This isn't a motherboard, it's not a PC, it's not some piece of trash laptop component. This is a very very powerful VME board. Industrial computing only - no, you can't afford the chassis to hold it. It's usually in the $20k+ range for a basic VME chassis able to handle this type of board, assuming I'm looking at my current pricing sheet. (I don't think it is, but it can't be that much cheaper.)

Now, it says it'll run VxWorks. Linux isn't on there. And I wouldn't waste my time - Linux won't work on it. Unless somebody's been REAL busy with the PPC tree, FORGET IT. PERIOD. END OF ARGUMENT HERE. Don't bother flaming me, I'll be more than happy to just delete it. LINUX DOES NOT RUN CORRECTLY ON SMP POWERPC AND HAS NOT FOR MANY MANY MANY MANY MANY MANY VERSIONS. For a VERY long time, it wouldn't even run on two processors. And when it did, there was *exponential* performance degredation on multiple processor systems. And now you think that MAGICALLY you're going to use *FOUR* PowerPC 750's (NOT G3s) with Linux? If it wasn't Slashdot, I wouldn't believe the incompetence and idiocy of claiming to run Linux.

And as if THAT weren't enough reasons, did we mention that LINUX DOES NOT SUPPORT VME? Last I checked, Linux doesn't even support CompactPCI! And somehow you're going to just run Linux on this? Give me a goddamn break. LynxOS won't even run on this, unless they've added VME support. That's why it says "VxWorks" and not "Linux" and not "Windows." The fanatics need to get their heads out of their rectums and realize that every time they make some blanket statement crap like this, they only make an ass of themselves.

This board doesn't even have a controller - what, you're going to magically plug in a SCSI disk to the chipset directly? The board boots and runs off of NVRAM Flash. This isn't some cracked-up PC. This is INDUSTRIAL equipment. How do I know these things? Probably because I have a CompactPCI (similar to VME somewhat) system built out for engine and onboard computer diagnostics and tuning. How much did it cost? I lease for a reason. What's it run? Not Linux, that's for damn sure. It runs LynxOS for a reason - not only because Linux isn't fit for the job (shut your mouths, zealots. I don't see any powerband analysis software for Linux any time soon.) but because LynxOS is *designed* for things like this.

Guess I probably pissed a lot of people off. Good. Maybe those of you who were offended by my comments will shut up, get your heads out of the clouds, and come back to earth sometime this year. Linux is not the do-everything OS, and it never will be at this rate. With supporters that claim it can do anything without any proof to back it up, and claiming it incorrectly half the time, I don't see any profit for ANYONE from it anytime soon. RedHat's stock isn't trading at 26 for no reason at all.

With supporters like this, I think I'll support FreeBSD instead. At least they have some respectability left.

=RISCy Business

Re:What it is and why Linux won't run on it.

[wowbagger]

Last I checked, Linux doesn't even
support CompactPCI!

Excuse me? I have with my very own hands brought Linux up on a Ziatech compact PCI board, thankyouverymuch! The only difference between standard PCI and cPCI is the layout of the bus: PCI uses an edge-card connection, while cPCI uses a 96 pin connector with controlled impedance. From the software perspective, there is no difference! Furthurmore, if you look over at Ziatech's home page you will see they list Linux quite prominantly.

Now, as for your comments about LinuxPPC, I cannot comment, as I have no experience there. But you are quite incorrect about cPCI. /. readers, take note and weigh the rest apropriately.

Re:What it is and why Linux won't run on it.

[alexhmit01]

No, the zealots usually aren't coders. They are users who don't right code, don't understand the concept of Free Software (or the less philosophical open source), and don't care.

They decided that Linux was cool, and that they are better people for using it. They realized that /. gives Karma for championing Linux at all costs, and post accordingly. Also, many of them are young (high school), and therefore have not been exposed to industrial equipment.

Like the sig, most slashdot readers think that the entire Internet could run on beige x86s, these people approach computing from a very narrow view.

They assume that because Linux is more stable than Win98, it is the most stable system on the planet. Also, because they don't crash it, they assume that it doesn't crash. They don't appreciate the value of real time OSes, and other things in the field. While people are working and hacking away at a real time Linux, the zealots don't care and champion Linux for real time work anyways. They compare a Beowulf cluster to an actual supercomputer (while it is a cheap way to get LOTS of processing, it isn't a supercomputer... it doesn't do what supercomputers do...), assume that Linux can replace S/390s, etc., etc.

Linux is getting hurt by the zealots, because they turn off potential users that are interested and could become interested in free software by criticizing all that disagree.

Further, just to alienate some people, I'm going to disagree with Linux being where it is because the zealots hacked code. Linux is where it is by an even MORE amazing set of circumstances than those that led Microsoft to it's position. Linux is here because RMS and company were finishing up the GNU tools around the time that Linus's kernel started to function. The combination formed an OS, and as the kernel got polished, the tools became useful. A few other projects worked, and Linux gained in popularity because of the GNU System and other free software.

Linux did NOT get anywhere by obnoxious teenagers insulting others for running another OS.

Alex

No mention of Linux, huh?

[penguinboy]

Try this page: http://www.synergymicro.com/vme _software/linux.html

Wow.

[mindstrm]

Put foot back in mouth. Be quiet.
As many have pointed out, both cPCI and VME are supported in linux. The manufacturer of the board in question even says it works.

Wow. Glad to know there are lots of 'experts' out there to educate everyone.

Re:rob's reality distortion field

[Tet]

GLGears runs great in my root window on a Celeron 500 with an ancient millineum II 4MB card.

Indeed. In fact, on decent hardware (read: non-Intel), you don't even need that. I used to run the slinky/staircase xlockmore mode whose name I can't remember in my root window. And that was on a HyperSparc 150. It was fine in wireframe, but a bit too slow to be useful when fully shaded. That was more due to memory starvation than anything else, though (I was running a dual headed X server, which chewed up a lot of RAM).