Vintage & unusual Computers on E@H Part II

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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I thought I would revive this

I thought I would revive this little thread :-)

Here are some really tiny E@H hosts, but hey, every bit helps:

This is a Parallella, see the thread here http://einsteinathome.org/node/196560 about this Kickstarter funded micro-computer with a 16 core accelerator (not yet usable for E@H, tho). The CPU is a dual core ARM. Unexpectedly it requires active cooling, so this one got a slightly improvised fan mounted.

Another Kickstarter project was the OUYA Android game console. People had high hopes for this as an indie-gaming platform, but as far as I can tell it failed to be a big success so far. If you have one of those and are disappointed by its gaming qualities, you can still use it for crunching, tho: it has a quad-core ARM processor by NVIDIA.

And last but not least: one of my Raspberry Pis. With a single core ARMv6 CPU, it is much weaker in performance than the previous two examples, but you don't buy a Raspi for BOINC crunching anyway. This one is spying on what my cats do when I'm at work (not much, actually) with the Raspberry Pi camera module mounted on top of the case, in combination with one of those inexpensive fish-eye lenses for smart phones. It's also a file server and is used to switch RF controlled power sockets (lights etc). It still has headroom for one BRP4 job so it's also doing BOINC.

Cheers
HB

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Definitely in the 'unusual'

Definitely in the 'unusual' category. A feline surveillance remote platform searching for gravitational waves ..... ;-0)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Logforme
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RE: A feline surveillance

Quote:
A feline surveillance remote platform searching for gravitational waves


#1 indication you overfeed your cats: They produce gravitational waves

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: RE: A feline

Quote:
Quote:
A feline surveillance remote platform searching for gravitational waves

#1 indication you overfeed your cats: They produce gravitational waves


Serious ROFL ! :-)

HB will have to realtime link it to GEO, and program it into the veto channels .....

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
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LOL! Yeah but to produce

LOL!

Yeah but to produce GW, it's not enough to be compact, you also have to move :-), so I think GEO 600 is safe as far as my cats go.

Cheers
HB

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Well, at least they would be

Well, at least they would be non-axisymmetric ....

Oh dear. This just goes so many ways !

Actually I reckon it is uber cool that you monitor your cats remotely, that is luv !

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Brandon Vincent
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Since the title of this

Since the title of this thread says "vintage & unusual computers", I'll throw one of my E@H computers into the picture.

http://einsteinathome.org/host/10730341

Raspberry Pis run circles around her, but I have a thing for keeping these machines alive.

mikey
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RE: Since the title of this

Quote:

Since the title of this thread says "vintage & unusual computers", I'll throw one of my E@H computers into the picture.

http://einsteinathome.org/host/10730341

Raspberry Pis run circles around her, but I have a thing for keeping these machines alive.

Too bad you don't live close to me, in Northern VA, I could fill your basement with 'vintage ones'!!

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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RE: Since the title of this

Quote:

Since the title of this thread says "vintage & unusual computers", I'll throw one of my E@H computers into the picture.

http://einsteinathome.org/host/10730341

Raspberry Pis run circles around her, but I have a thing for keeping these machines alive.

Cool. Actually this one is about as fast as a Raspberry Pi with modest overclocking, ca 125.000 s for a single BRP4 workunit. Nice!!

Quoting from Wikipedia :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_II#UltraSPARC_IIi

Quote:
The UltraSPARC IIi "Sabre" was a low-cost version introduced in 1997 that operated at 270 to 360 MHz. It was fabricated in a 0.35 µm process and possessed a die size of 156 mm². It dissipated 21 W and used a 1.9 V power supply. It had a 256 KB to 2 MB L2 cache. In 1998, a version code-named Sapphire-Red, was fabricated in a 0.25 µm process, enabling the microprocessor to operate at 333 to 480 MHz. It dissipated 21 W at 440 MHz and used a 1.9 V power supply.

Workstations with this CPU looked like this, for example (Wikipedia):

Did you have any problems compiling BRP4 for it, or did it work out-of-the-box?

Brandon Vincent
Brandon Vincent
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The only real problem I

The only real problem I encountered was due to the byte order of the data being inputted to BRP4.

x86 is little endian compared to SPARC which is big endian.

For those interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

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