about thumper aka sun fire x4500

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 17, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> I do not have one of these boxes / am not familiar with them, but
> HyperTransport is an AMD thing.  The concept is that it's a bus that
> interconnects different pieces of a system to the CPU (and thus the
> memory bus).  

While that was a nice picture, it's not related to the bus architecture of a Sun 4500. :-)

An X or E 4500 is a highly fault-tolerant parallel minicomputer with 8 slots-- one was I/O, and you could put up to 7 CPU boards with dual UltraSPARC processors-- you could hot-plug CPU boards and memory in the event of a failure and keep the rest of the system up.  They cost a significant fraction of a million dollars circa y2k.

A check of some old docs suggests:

Hypertransport Sync Flood occurred on last boot: Uncorrectable ECC error caused the last reboot.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck