Please help me Identify this hardware

Question

Hi Guys
Ive gotten hold of a Cluster of 40 nodes, all have Ultrasparc IIE cpu's
I don;t have it with me yet, but as they have no monitor ports etc, I need to figure out how to install and set it up, for instance does it support PXE booting etc, does the master node have monitor/keyboard ports, what model is the hardware, and how the hell do I setup a cluster, im doing this as a project, I have some experience with linux, but am not an expert, here is the description i have, and also links to 2 pictures.
"Telite "Sun" 40 node Computer Cluster
Specification
40 nodes of UltraSPARC Processors
Mother Board: - Sun chipset motherboards
Processors: - Sun PG1.4.1 GSO Ultra SPACR IIe - 6471-500 SME 1701 PGA 500 MHz CPU (spec http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IIe/specs.xml)
Hard Disk: - each with an 20GB internal HDD
Memory: - 128M of PC133 DRAM each
Ethernet: - Dual 100M Ethernet (built on the motherboard) Single PCI slot
1 Master" node, with a cdrom drive"
Pic1: [Picture 1|http://i6.ebayimg.com/01/i/000/e6/b5/4bbd_1.JPG]
Pic2: [Picture 2|http://i11.ebayimg.com/08/i/000/e6/b5/4b1d_1.JPG]
Thanks
DJH

Answer 1

Sun Microsystems has a department/division/subsidiary (however you might think of it) that is named Sun Microelectronics (SME).
SME manufactures bare board products and sells them to any OEM customer that might wish to use the components in whatever product they choose. That permits the OEM customer to concentrate on their product and not need to invent the bare board piece of the product.
See:
http://www.sun.com/oem/platforms/index.html
For example ...
I currently work for a medical equipment company that uses SME boards as the computer at the heart of our product. It was very cost effective to fit a bare board into the product rather than make the product accomodate the shape of an off-the-shelf computer.
Your photos seem to be of a rack-sized chassis that has 40 discrete computers in it.
40 of the AXE1105 boards, 40 500MHz processors, 40 IDE disk drives, 40 sets of RAM.
The names on that chassis in your photo are for someone that is surprisingly NOT found using Google. I have no idea who they might be, but it was an intriguing effort on their part.
You don't have a hardware cluster in the strict usage of that word.
You have a box with forty computers in it.
You could (perhaps) combine them in a software cluster, or in what was termed a grid of computing.
You could consider configuring them as individual web hosts, such as what a co-location site might use.
To install an OS, you install the first system that has the optical drive, then you learn how to use that one as a jumpstart server to install the other individual systems, each with their own OS.
The equipment to administer the individual computers with terminal concentrators or KVM-over-Ethernet would likely cost more than you paid for it at the auction web site.
... if you've already committed to buying it, you could consider stripping it and sell the individual parts back onto the auction web site.