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Run LinuxPPC In A Spare Drive Bay
Knobby was one of the several people to point out a really neat piece of hardware. He writes: "Total Impact just announced (a few days ago) their 'briQ'. It's a PPC G3 or G4 machine measuring 5.74 X 1.625 X 8.9 inches with a single 64bit 66MHz PCI slot, integrated 10/100Mbit networking, a 40GB HDD, and ships with LinuxPPC.. The press release on the page doesn't mention it, but the announcement I received mentioned a starting price of ~$2500.. Note: These are the same folks making the quad G3 and G4 processor PCI cards mentioned in an earlier article."
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard /memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
You're ready to upgrade to an S-100 bus machine, then.
Hay thar.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
What, you never read my posts?
More on topic - I find the idea cool, but realistically, I can get commodity 1U systems for less if all I want is slim computin power, and if I really need something tiny, I know where to get PC104.
Should say:
I received mentioned a startling price of ~$2500.
Then their quad powerpc board is "$4500, quad g4/400's are ~$6500."
Whow - this thing must be fast. If I read their specs correctly they are using the IBM CPC710 100+ chip. This means that they have dual independant PCI busses. One 33MHz and one 66MHz. If they have hung all the slow stuff off the 33MHz and left the 66MHz on the connector then they got a quite some of a connectivity. Anyway - I am happy that it is not a Mac. Makes techsupport a lot easier.
The only reason I submited this article, was to counter the "PPC is nice tech, but where can I get it other than Apple" comments.. The point here is not the size, or shape of this board. The point is that someone other than Apple is shipping a PPC machine.. I realize there are a lot of good, small x86 boards out there..
In all honesty, I don't think a $2500 box with a single G4 processor, a 10/100 adapter, and a 40GB HDD is worth the cash.. Especially, not when I can get a Dual G4 box from Apple for considerably less.. Hell, even the cube is cheaper, and it ships with a DVD
I know what I'd use one for. I'd snake an ethernet cable out the back and use it as a Linux box within my Windows box, without needing to deal with the space that an extra machine would take up.
;)
Then I'd run an X server on my Windows box so that I didn't need two monitors.
I'd like it..
Gentoo Sucks
It's far more prudent for light duty uses like that to buy cheap PC104 hardware and run a regular x86 freenix on it.
Hay thar.
I have a passive backplane 386 processor card somewhere in all my old junk. It has integrated I/O and drive controllers. I used to use it plugged into a two slot backplane. I believe I ran Slackware (probably kernel 1.2.13...) on it for a time. It was awhile ago...
Hay thar.
Will it run Darwin ? If it can, then would it be possible to run Aqua on top of that?
Let's face it, at its core, MacOS X is another Unix distro (albeit not Linux)
That would bring a whole new meaning to the term Mac-in-the-box.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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For those who care, we have a brief wrap up of most Linux distros available for PPC at GNUpples. Enjoy.
"This is highly unlikely to result in all sorts of people going out and buying these sorts of machines; it's just not economical unless there's a compelling need that justifies paying a couple grand for a pretty small server."
... Still interesting to know we should be waiting for it.
The point is that they are available. The $2500 is, in all likelihood, the introductory price based on "how many people want these things?!"... Once a few are sold, I'm sure the price will drop considerably.
In time little grass-hoppah.... in time....
Another important thing to note is these machines probably have better heat dissipation than larger machines [I'm basing this on the idea that 1) heat disipation would have to be improved to even offer them, and 2) If they are smaller, they are easier to cool; because moving air can be directed at and away from them with less energy (ie: the diff. between a cpu fan and a case-fan)].. In the least, they would be useful for applications where heat is a problem. I'm sure big bizz. will be buying into them so us little guys can reap the price drop in a year or two.
Ace
The points you miss are that a) there were, once upon a time, as many different measuring systems as there were civilizations (could you imagine scientific exchange in the Roman Empire?) and b) the "human factors" involved come down to familiarity.
Human factors? How 'bout these factors:
-The English volume system was originally base 2, and vestiges of it still exist: gal = 128 oz, qt = 64 oz, pt = 16 oz, c = 8 oz. Most of the other measurements in the series (drams, etc.) have been forgotten. (While you're at it, consider imperial volumes and dry volumes, both of which break the system as well...)
-Distances: inches, feet, yards, furlongs, fathoms, rods, miles, nautical miles (?!), etc, etc, etc. Or you can do everything in meters and kilometers and no one will get too confused.
-Weights: Three words: troy and avoirdupois. Why?
-Temperature: This is a particular embarassment -- I have heard (or at least Cecil Adams claims) that Fahrenheit calibrated the bottom end of his scale for the convenience of a weather-tracking friend (I want to say Ole Roemer) so that his logbooks would never have to deal with negative numbers (at least as long as he stayed in Denmark).
You tell me. The benefit of the metric system is that it makes consistent understanding of measurements possible. A kilo is a kilo, no matter what you're weighing. The only reason people in the US have not converted is because the government tried to split the difference back in the seventies and only wound up confusing people. But it's a lot easier than what we have.
/Brian
well right now HP puts 8 half height drives in a 2u rack configuration, so if you used a 42u rack you could conciveable run 168 computers in 1 rack , thats alot of computer in a 2 metre rack, plus it could double as a whole house heating solution :-)
Before Apple put AGP on their towers, they included one 64bit, 66MHz PCI slot and stuck a video card in it. With the introduction of 2x and 4x AGP on Macs, it's gone away.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
And the idea of a cpu being on a slot really isn't a bad idea (I think pci would be too slow personally). But why oh why would you need a completely different computer in a drive bay (thats assuming you have any available).
This is a variant on a design concept dating from the "Big Board".
For those not familiar with it: The Big Board was a CPM-era machine. In those days when your basic PC was a desktop box the size of a mini-tower, with a front panel full of blinky lights and switches, a pair of EXternal 8" floppy drives. 8080 or Z80 processor, up to 64K of RAM. Alphanumeric dumb terminal or teletype for a console. Brand names like "Altair" or "Imsai" and maybe you assembled it yourself.
As complex-function chips improved a company had a great idea for a cheap process controller: They built a computer-on-a-board. It had a Z80, 64K (the max) of RAM, RAM-window alphanumeric video generator, two parallel ports (one for the keyboard, one for machine control), a serial port, a boot/monitor ROM, a floppy controller, and all supporting circuitry. But that's not all:
The board was exactly the same form factor as the electronics card on the floppy disk, right down to the hole placement and power connector. You just bolted it on top of the drive's board (with longer screws and standoff bushings), powered it with a two-drive power supply, stuffed in a floppy, and you had a machine controller. Plug in a monitor, a keyboard, and/or a network connection if appropriate for your application. Program it with the inexpensive CPM development tools.
Of course what ACTUALLY happened is that the hobbiests got hold of it and used it as a small, cheap, powerful CPM machine for home-computer use. (A little later Xerox licensed the design and built it into a monitor cabinet, to make a CPM machine the form factor of a monitor as their entry into the PC business.)
But the basic idea remained valid. As drives shrank (physically) and processors advanced to X80s you continued to see strap-onto-the-drive single-board computers ("SBC"s) for industrial process automation.
This looks like a variant on the idea: Put it in the slot next to the actual drive on a multi-drive bay (or put two drive mounts into your industrial machine), add power and some interface cables, and you're in business. No one-of engineering to automate your industrial machine, so your engineers only have to design the machine itself. The programming environment is the same as the desktops, so you can use off-the-shelf development tools.
You don't have to reinvent the whole wheel. Just tweak the trim for the new model year. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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...need to get with it and get that PPC support out the door.. :-)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Now I have to admit there are good reasons for making small computers. And the idea of a cpu being on a slot really isn't a bad idea (I think pci would be too slow personally). But why oh why would you need a completely different computer in a drive bay (thats assuming you have any available). The only practical reason I could possibly see for this is having allot of servers in one box. Otherwise I can make room for another full computer :)
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Operarting System: LinuxPPC - other distributions supported
Anyone know which other distros are supported?
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Moderator's essentials
Could be a good mp3/vorbis player, small, much power and no fans. Would be good as nat router,too. ;)
Jan
And I tought the Apple cube was expensive....
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Could be a good mp3/vorbis player, small, much power and no fans. Would be good as nat router,too.
Jan
Now Apple needs to make a version of the Titanium Powerbook with a removeable "linuxPPC" drive :).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
No matter what API you're using (SMP/threads or Beowulf/PVM) these are most likely best used for SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) kinds of problems (of which SETI is one). Communication between boards will be a major performance bottleneck, since they all share the same bus. Since they do have local RAM (and not just cache), you load the card's RAM with one set of code and four sets of data. Do that for all the cards you have. Now wait, and get your answers back off the local RAM. Did you use threads or processes? Threads and its closer to SMP, processes and it is closer to PVM or Beowulf. But will it outperform a comparable Beowulf cluster? If it is compute-constrained, then the PCI cards will do better, especially as the problem scales, because the PCI cards share hardware costs for disks, network cards, fast bus, large RAM, etc. If it is disk or network limited, though, the Beowulf will eventually win out. The PCI cards will do well on a price/performance basis while the problem is small, because it will still be sharing hardware. But once the PCI bus fills up, those processors will start waiting on the bus. The bigger the problem gets, the more the processors wait. The Beowulf cluster, on the other hand, can distribute all that hardware - instead of one 100Mbps network card, it may have dozens (you start worrying more about what your ethernet switch's backplane looks like). So these cards are best for compute-intensive simulation-style stuff (image filters would also scream - mostly - FFTs require lots of communication). Simulated wind tunnels or weather phenomena, finite-element analysis, etc. Note though, that these cards have their own slower PCI bus, including support for an add-on card (!), so conceivably you could get a lot of server oomph by giving every four processors their own network card. But you better make sure you data (i.e., your web site) can fit in the local RAM, or you'll bog down in bus contention again.
It would be great for a Beowulf cluster if only it were cheaper.
It's fast, it takes up minimal space. You could fit hundreds on a few racks if you could just figure out how to cool it.
This doesn't sound like an easily replaced MB to me, it sounds like one of those integrated units that you can't twiddle with.
But the idea of an easily replaced MB is kinda silly anyhow, it is the hub into which everything else plugs, having it removable would require making something else the hub. Then it would be hard to replace... and you'd get slowdown due to increased wire length.
Considering the lovely condition of state poewr problems here in california, this could be a great solution if implemented.
;-)
Since these machines are small, and are more or less fuill-featured computers, this could make building a server farm a lot cheaper and less power hungry, since one could have each of these set up as its own server, feeding off of a single rackmount cases's power supply, instead of having each server having its own oversized powersupply, as seen in SO many installations.
and at this size and power usage, it would also cut down on AC costs dramatically, as you can now fit several dozen computers in a space that you could possibly fit only maybe 10, therefore reducing the necessary cooling costs.
--warning--beowulf comment follows---
Now, where can i get a beowulf cluster of these?
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
SPARCplug
I don't know about putting it in a spare drive bay, but I do think that it would be a nice replacement for a car stereo. It already has a display built in to the front if it, just add some more controls and a sound card and you're ready to go.
interesting...
I notice that the home page says that the 64-bit 66MHz PCI connector is "custom". Now, I don't know about you, but every time I see the word "custom" in relation to a connector, it always seems to mean something along the lines of "Proprietary form factor which will only take the expansion options produced by us, which will cost you an arm and a leg and disappear off the market approximately three seconds after we stop production of the main board. Haw haw, sucker!"
I'd have preferred it if they could have just made it into a double drive bay item that allows you to use full-size PCI cards in the extra space.
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I can just see it now... Get an old metal lunchbox, stick this in the main compartment, with a small LCD screen on top, and shoehorn a keyboard w/ touchpad into the underside of the lid. Add some ports on the bottomof the lunchbox and a power supply (somewhere...) Voila! You've got a LinuxPPC lunchbox.
Gives a whole new meaning to swapping lunches...
Brett
Yay, finally some news on more people making PPC boxes! I can now rest. Lots of people have been pointing out that a couple years ago you could shell out 9k bucks for a non-UltraSPARC box that could fit inside a PC or that Cubes and G4 towers are cheaper. Who the fuck cares. The cool thing here is more people than just Apple are selling PPC boxes. All the stories of this catagory that get posted always end up bashed because everyone points out Apple and then when Apple actually does something they get bashed. Oh well.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Or, if you've got any PCI-based Sun workstation (Ultra-5 and up) and you want/need a PC as well, you can get one of these puppies: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/ Populated with a Celeron-600 and (iirc) 128MB ram, they run $495
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- 1 - 66 MHz PCI Bus with one PCI Slot which accepts a 66 MHz 32-bit PCI card.
- 1 - 33 MHz PCI Bus with three PCI Slots which accept 33 MHz 32-bit or 64-bit cards.
That's not the same as 1- 66mhz pci bus that accepts 64-bit cards.-Daniel
PS it did sound plausable and interesting though
Who needs a Mac in a drive bay when you can stuff a SPARC in there! I remember seeing a "SPARCPlug" by Ross Technologies a few years ago. Wonder what happened to them....
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
Also sounds like quite an expensive solution to an already-solved problem. There are a number of manufacturers of passive-backplane systems that provide just that level of convenience. Basically, the passive backplane consists of a long board with something like 6 PCI and 6 ISA slots. This backplane installs in the case in the same position as a traditional motherboard. The CPU/RAM/Chipset "motherboard" is actually just a big PCI card that does bus mastering, and all your other peripherals sit in the slots. You can even get split backplanes, where more than one "motherboard" can coexist in the same case.
Nice thing about this design is that if any card fails, including the "motherboard", you yank it out and replace it - the backplane itself is so simple it basically never fails. And ventilation is usually better, since all your hot components are in the middle of the case rather than on the bottom or side -- a lot of these cases have a row of big 120mm fans across the entire front, so everything is well ventilated.
Most of the ones you'll see out there are fairly large (a little bigger than an old-style AT case), but I've even seen and used passive-backplane minitowers. The nice thing about these is that the form factor allows for a lot more room for slots in the case and therefore more peripherals.
At $1000, they would be a pretty good value.
At $2500, Californians care about the power consumption this week, although if things stabilize in a month, they may not care so much.
For the rest of us, such pricing is daunting unless there's a really compelling application that needs the exact form factor provided.
This is highly unlikely to result in all sorts of people going out and buying these sorts of machines; it's just not economical unless there's a compelling need that justifies paying a couple grand for a pretty small server.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Would be to wipe the stinky Linux and install OpenBSD PowerPC
Like a SPARCplug ?
Yes this is a powerPC board, but for ~500$ you can get a 3.5 form factor x86 with dual ether, and real video. I got one for dev at work from Advantech The entire thing run off of a 5v suppy. Get a laptop hard drive (44pin IDE) and you have an entire 5v system that will take a standard power plug from your power suppy. Emjembedded also has similar stuff.
Suppose your workhorse unit is an Intel box, but you've also got to make sure your code also runs on a Sparc or PPC. Buy a couple of these guys and plug 'em in! We bought several similar Sparc "bricks" about five years ago for a similar purpose.
Small, tidy, you don't need another monitor/keyboard.
Plus imagine the Beowulf possibilities (smirk)
Bad Apple, Bad! Why don't you name your freaking gifs so people who don't surf with images can navigate your site? You gotta wonder how blind people navigate trash like that. Hate that site.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Does not reporting the death of the DC count as an error?
Where's the beef?
Damn, thats gotta be the lowest UID ive ever seen around here on
damn.
Your old school
</OT>
but getting back to topic, the added benefit that this also provides, versus a completely passive backplane solution, is that while you can dedicate a rack case to a backplane with a few of the controller cards, with these, you can also put a little server in the spare drive bays of your other servers, and anywhere that it might fit, since it isnt requiring its own case like a backplane solution.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
:)
Well no, this is an integrated unit, like the "nailed" router that's providing me DSL right now. This is an embedded platform. It can sit behind a security panel and provide the processor power to do voice recognition -- that sort of thing.
On the iMac, it's just as easy to replace the motherboard as the hard drive, because the rate-determining step is opening the case.
I'd rather have a SparcPlug!
If each developer had their own server (albeit, in their own worksation), they could offload processes to it (have it compile while you're busy fragging), or just use it as a server to test things on. You could also give novice admins their own server to learn with.
The main thing is, the marketroids have already figured out who the audience is, and have figured out they can make money. It's up to us to come up with new/novel uses. Like, an overly expensive MP3 player for your car.