From owner-freebsd-small Wed Dec 19 10:25:13 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Received: from aurora.regenstrief.org (aurora.regenstrief.org [134.68.31.122]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B38C437B419 for ; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 10:25:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from aurora.regenstrief.org ([134.68.31.50]) by aurora.regenstrief.org (8.11.6/8.9.3) with ESMTP id fBJIPDv62565 for ; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:25:13 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from gunther@aurora.regenstrief.org) Message-ID: <3C20DB85.4070505@aurora.regenstrief.org> Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:25:09 -0500 From: Gunther Schadow Organization: Regenstrief Institute for Health Care User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: PicoBSD List Subject: Anti-Pico: FreeBSD SMP MAINFRAME need some hints Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I'm deliberately posting to the wrong list here, because I know you're good guys :-). I am looking for the antithesis of your typical PicoBSD platform. I'm looking for a scaleable PCI SMP mainframe based on x86 or whatever runs FreeBSD. If you know something for other *BSDs or Linux I'm all ears too. I'm thinking of a backplane where you can plug in anything from 1 to 6 (or more) x86 CPU cards. Then have same flexibility with memory plug in and go. All CPUs accessing the same RAID cluster. All behaves just like a multi CPU x86 box, just more scaleable. In addition it would be nice to not be limited to the current state of the art in clock speed. I'm sure 2 GB x86 CPUs are around the corner (or already there?) and you don't want to buy a mainframe system to let it be passed by your peoples more recent laptops in a year. (I own some VAX 6000s and it's just neat how you can plug CPUs and memory in and out of the XMI bus, so, that's where the idea comes from :-) The application is a database server, based on PostgreSQL aspiring to run some demanding OLTP and data-warehouse applications. May be mainframes are not the answer any more, but I think as x86 CPUs now come in multi CPU boxes it would be nice to have some scaleability here. What do you think? -Gunther -- Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D. gschadow@regenstrief.org Medical Information Scientist Regenstrief Institute for Health Care Adjunct Assistant Professor Indiana University School of Medicine tel:1(317)630-7960 http://aurora.regenstrief.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message