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A180C Stacked Together

 
Ramil Castillo
Occasional Contributor

A180C Stacked Together

My customer has 2 A80C's and asking if they can stack it together to produce a better machine giving them additional resources. Is this possible? If yes, please send me the procedures and the requirements.
5 REPLIES 5
Luk Vandenbussche
Honored Contributor

Re: A180C Stacked Together

This is not possible.
The only thing you can do is move the memory from one server to the other
Florian Heigl (new acc)
Honored Contributor

Re: A180C Stacked Together

This is not possible as easy as they imagine it.
If they run something in the terms of high-performance computing, they could use infiniband or myrinet and a cluster-aware C/Fortran compiler, but I very much doubt it.

I've got an A180C myself, and I'd like to answer honest:
This box is just too slow for compute-intensive tasks, and it's memory architecture, limit of 2GB + the 32bit CPU will also render it useless for data intensive work.

The A180C looks newer than a K-Class, but is much slower. And a K-Class is really slow in nowadays terms. :)

Ask them to get one current IA64_2 based system, which will easily provide 10 times the performance of the two A180C.

The A180C will easily find another task!(webserver, dns, anything that suits better)
yesterday I stood at the edge. Today I'm one step ahead.
Jeff Schussele
Honored Contributor

Re: A180C Stacked Together

Hi Ramil,

The only way I can see this happen would be to run some type of grid software like Oracle 10g.
BUT....this is 64-bit SW I'm sure so that would rule out the absolutely last 32-bit system HP ever built - the A180 - sorry.

Rgds,
Jeff
PERSEVERANCE -- Remember, whatever does not kill you only makes you stronger!
Bill Hassell
Honored Contributor

Re: A180C Stacked Together

Improving performance by throwing more processors and memory at the problem seldom works. It is extremely complicated (and expensive software) to share processing loads between different computers so the better solution is to optimize your application or look at a replacement. As mentioned, the A180's are quite slow and an A500 (same size) will run circles around the A180. The good news is that an A500 (or renamed rp2405) runs quite a bit under $5000 to purchase and would easily replace 3 or 4 A180's.


Bill Hassell, sysadmin
rick jones
Honored Contributor

Re: A180C Stacked Together

I'll see Bill's suggestion and raise him an rp34XX or rx1620 :) The rp3410 is still PA-RISC and will run the customer's PA-RISC binaries "natively" (even 10.20 binaries should still run on 11.11/11.23)

The rx1620 should run even bigger rings around the A180's, and is 1U, so 1/4 the rack space of the two A180C's, is Itanium2 and would likely still run the older PA-RISC apps just fine under Aries emulation. And given just how slow the A180 is - heck, it was old/slow when it first shipped to be frank - the Aries emulation is likely to be still rather faster than the A180 itself.

there is no rest for the wicked yet the virtuous have no pillows