about thumper aka sun fire x4500

[Marcus Reid]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 03:12:19PM -0800, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> 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.

You're thinking E4500, which is as you describe.  The X4500 is described
here:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire_X4500

Marcus