Sun gets generous
For some reason or other, I was reading an entry on Jonathan’s Schwartz’s weblog the other day, which led me to this page.Which says, nay urges you to borrow a Sun server for 60 days. Even as an individual! Usually, you gotta be corporate IT to get this kind of offer.The machines are best suited for multithreaded apps with little FPU; I have several I want to test. Between this and an unrelated winning of a drawing, I’m feeling rather benevolent towards Sun right now. Haven’t had this much fun since the days of a roomful of Sun gear…
That was from undergrad/grad, when we’d get surplus gear from Sandia/LANL auctions. If you squint, there’s an SGI Iris, a Sparc 2, Sparc LX, several sparc printers (the first winprinter, which is not praise), DEC SCSI enclosures, a seven-channel oscilloscope, my Freebsd x86 box, and of course the trusty 56k modem that was my lifeline to the world. Ahh, good times.More recently I had this setup all nicely stacked up:
(That was in Illinois, where I used LXs for servers. Note the kalpana, the very first ethernet switch!)
This T2000 box is 2U, 16 physical/32 virtual CPUs, up to 64GB of memory, quad gig ethernet. Its a pocket supercomputer, really. Amazing times that we live in!
Anyway, it’s a nice offer, so do consider it if they’d meet your needs. I’ll be posting benchmarks as I get them.
Update: I was looking for a better picture, and found that Sun has an entire site of product photos! Go and be amazed.
August 1st, 2006 at 1:51 pm
[...] The ultra-lovely Sun T-2000 has returned home. Many thanks to Sun for their generous loan of hardware. The ABC conjecture code ran superbly on it, as did the Java-based data turbine. I really wish I could get 2 or 3 of these for work; they’d make superb servers for a lot of what we do. The rack efficiency is amazing. [...]
February 21st, 2007 at 4:48 pm
[...] Oh yeah, the hardware is my laptop, on top of a Caen RAID chassis and Sun T2000 server. [...]