Big Pentium / Pentium Pro SMP Systems from DEC / Compaq with Alphaserver 8400 / GS140 style cabinets ? >= 8 CPUs

[Wildfire]

Hello folks,

it is quite some time ago i once saw in a computing room besides some then actual Big Iron Alphaserver GS8400 / GS140 running Tru64 a cabinet which looked identical.
I thought it is another GS8400 / GS140, but while looking at the panel where the other systems had their Alphaserver label this one had a "Pentium Pro" label !

If i remember correctly it should have been an eight way PPRO.

I tried to get some information about these systems with a websearch but only found some info about the smaller ( up to 4 way Pentium / PPRO ) Prioris HX MP systems.

So eventually here pops up some info about this system ?
Also i am interested in getting to know if there ever has been an Pentium (socket 5) system with up to 8 CPUs from DEC / Compaq also ?

TIA!

 

[gslick]

There was the HP NetServer LXr Pro8.

The HP NetServer LXr Pro8 extends the capabilities of the award-winning HP NetServer L Series systems with up to 8-way multiprocessing and these other features designed for business-critical Microsoft® Windows® NT™ environments.

Up to 32 Intel® Pentium® Pro CPUs (across four servers) in a single 2.0-meter, 19-inch rack for greater computing power per rack than any other system from a major PC vendor.

 

[twolazy]

Beat me to it ! LOL, that is all I could find as well.

 

[Wildfire]

Data General f.e. did this says wikipedia:

The AV 20000 ("Audubon") connected to 32 Pentium Pro processors (on up to eight quad-processor building blocks) in this manner; the later AV 25000 ("Audubon 2") upgrade expanded this to 64 Pentium II (later Pentium III) Xeons.

Would be so cool to get my hands on such an early big smp system...

Up to now the biggest one i have is an HP Netserver LH 6000 with 6x Xeon, 8x 1GB SDram, 12x scsi drives.
Nice machine with Linux, but i would like to have a bigger one

 

[czunit]

Interesting. Back when I was with IEEE Computer Society in 1995 we had a 8 processor (486/50) NCR 3550 monster that was gifted to us by AT&T. I took that system to heart, loaded it with 4.3gb disks and built out the original CS Digital Library on it. The 4 CPUs+NT 4.0+Netscape Commerce Server (we worked with UIUC on that) and lots of little Dynaweb processes got the SGML+TEK math to appear in HTML format.

We the upgraded it to 16 Pentium Pro 200 CPUs and finally switched out the Pentiums for Pentium Pro Overdrives (333mhz I think). That stunt could be done because the HAL treated each pair of CPUs as a node channeled to the L2 cache (L3 cache was also there for all processor pairs to access the memory), so the limitation on the ODP didn't apply/matter. Damn thing wasn't "fast" per se but had an amazing amount of bandwidth (augmented by a pair of MicroChannel busses for Dulpexed disk and IO activity)

When I left in 2000 it was still the primary DLP system (TALOS) and for awhile was one of the faster SETIATHOME nodes.

CZ
(I really should write a book about all that. It was an amazing time)