On Thursday 10 July 2008, Lombard, David N wrote: > On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 10:50:03AM -0700, Jim Lux wrote: > > in classic /. form, should we not now interject: > > > > What about a beowulf cluster of PDP-8s (or -1s or IBM 1130s or...)? > > Hmmm, don't know about the PDPs, but there aren't a lot of working 1130's > about. ibm1130.org has one, along with cards, disk cartridges, docs, &etc. > They also have a simulator that permits you to run R2 V12! Brings back > memories... Too bad they can't find the EMU-Fortran.
There are quite a few PDP-8s around. I have a PDP-8/E, PDP-8/F and two PDP-8 compatible Decmates - all are operational. There are even more PDP-11s "about". I've got a PDP 11/34C, 11/85, several 11/23s an LSI-11 and a MINC 11/23 (laboratory computer) - all operational. Typical peripherals: 9 track tape, RX02 8" floppies, RL01/2 Cartridge Drives (5MB+10MB), etc > As for a cluster of 1130 simulators; IIRC, the only networking they had > was in support of the RJE station. Perhaps you could run an EP code with > a 360 as the headnode :p As to clustering... Latency would be a "bit" of a problem. PDP-8s only support serial and synchronous "networks". 9600 baud won't quite make it as a high performance cluster infrastructure ;-) PDP-11s do have 10Base Ethernet. But running TCP/IP on a PDP-11 is incredibly slow (even if running BSD Unix). It take just about everything the processor has just to push the packets out. So one could create a true ethernet cluster infrastructure - but there wouldn't be much processor power left over to do calculations. So as much as I love these old beasties, they just don't make great clusters, sigh... On the other hand, VAXes just might :-) Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA 94040 http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero" _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
