[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Loic Tortay]

Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 10:32:22AM +0200, Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, I was thinking about companies like Penguin or Scalable, designing 
>> their own hardware products, like Relions or JackRabbits, and not just 
>> reselling Supermicro boxes. Unless I'm mistaken on the fact that those systems 
>> are somewhat different from off-the-shelf boxes. 
> 
> You would be mistaken. I can't name the Relion by eye, but there are a
> ton of people selling the 48-disk building block that is Sun's
> Thumper, which seems to be the chassis is of the JackRabbit. Sun
> bought the hardware from someone else, and the deal wasn't
> exclusive. Now there are probably multiple manufacturers.
> 
Ah ah ah, you've obviously never seen a "Thumper". :)

The common 48 disks slots/4U chassis used by several vendors, for 
instance DDN, is not the same as the X45x0 one.  More often than not, 
it's the Xyratex 48 slots chassis (which is apparently used by Penguin too).

They're not the same, the disks are not put in the same way at all, 
there is no central control board in the X45x0 and the density is 
different too since there is no room for the motherboard in the Xyratex 
chassis.

As far as I know, the "seminal" hardware that became the Sun X4500 was 
designed "off the ground" by a company later bought by Sun (Kealia).


Loïc.