Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!sun!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: 1001 Amigas (was Ray-tracing article...) Message-ID: <17246@sun.uucp> Date: Thu, 23-Apr-87 13:48:54 EST Article-I.D.: sun.17246 Posted: Thu Apr 23 13:48:54 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 25-Apr-87 07:35:36 EST References: <629@puff.WISC.EDU> <3450001@hplsdla.HP.COM> Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA Lines: 67 Summary: Actually 1000 Amigas in a room. Forgive me for carrying this rather 'blue-sky' conversation going but thought it might be fun. In article <3450001@hplsdla.HP.COM>, kary@hplsdla.HP.COM (Dan Kary) writes: >> / keithe@tekgvs.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) / 10:41 am Apr 13, 1987 / >> Lessee - a Cray costs (how the heck do _I_know what a Cray costs?) say 2 >> megabucks. So I could buy (2e6/2e3)=1e3=1000 Amigas (does $2000 for an Amiga >> sound reasonable - especially if I'm buying a thousand of 'em?) So then the >> 14400 hours becomes 14.4 hours. Not bad, maybe? >> >> keith (keep it in perspective) ericson > > I'm sure it's fun to say things like this, but as long as we're keeping > things in perspective, where are you going to put those 1000 Amiga's? > How are you going to operate them? Communicate between them? > > Dan (Reality, what a concept) Kary Hmmm, What If ... We stacked Amiga's 10 high and put one multiplexed monitor/keyboard on each stack. The composite video is one shielded line and the keyboard is just an rj11 jack, so 10:1 switch muxes shouldn't be to hard to come up with. At 6" per Amiga body that still fits in a 6' rack, even with a extra floppy to the right of the system unit. So now 10 of these racks will be one hundred Amigas. And each are about two feet wide so that's twenty feet of wall space. If we use 'thin' racks they are about 2 feet deep too, but we need about two feet between them so that we can walk up and down feeding them floppies. So ten rows of racks will need about 40 feet of space. Ok thats a pretty normal machine room size (ok it's a big machine room). Now on to how to operate them... Obviously they would all have to have kickstart in rom since you would want to leave a workbench disk in the internal drive. Maybe an Ameristar ethernet board on each one so that they can share a given database area on a machine with big disks (a Sun 3 with a super eagle perhaps :-)). Then each workbench disk's startup-sequence includes commands to mount an NFS file system and as for the frame to generate from a list based on host numbers. Each machine would read that info and then write it's frame back to the super eagle (or two, we're talking lots of data here). There would be a program on the Sun to dump all of the frames to a sequence of tapes for transfer to 35MM film. So what have we got here ... 1000 Amigas 1000 external drives 1000 Ameristar boards 1000 Memory expansions (for full resolution images) 1000 square feet of machine room (with power) 100 6' 19" racks 100 Monitors, and mux boxes for keyboard/monitor 1 Sun 3 with lots of disk space 100 ethernet mux boxes 255 meters of yellow ethernet cable And all of this for pretty pictures ? Well you could amortize your costs somewhat. First of all you will have 900 extra keyboards and 1000 extra mice that you might be able to sell into the spares market. Secondly, with the extra drive you would have the most phenomenal Amiga disk duplication service around! --Chuck (still stuck in reality) McManis -- --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.