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Sun Fire (no, not the car)

embrikembrik Registered User regular
edited September 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
So, at work, we're about to have 14 of these guys on our hands. (Sun Fire V100 rackmount servers).

As you can see from that site, they're pretty basic servers. The stuff that ran on them is going to beefier hardware, and we'll be left with 14 paperweights.

Any ideas of what to do w/ 'em? Is it possible to load Linux on them? Maybe I could use them for Folding, but I don't know for sure.

A quick search on eBay tells me that they're worth about $100 apiece. Almost not worth trying to sell.

"Damn you and your Daily Doubles, you brigand!"

I don't believe it - I'm on my THIRD PS3, and my FIRST XBOX360. What the heck?
embrik on

Posts

  • bowenbowen Sup? Registered User regular
    edited September 2008
    I'd set up some sort of clustering system just to do it. Sounds like fun and sun are god awesome for that sort of plan. At that point you might actually have a pretty awesome server setup capable of standard server stuff.

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • Farout FoolioFarout Foolio Registered User regular
    edited September 2008
    Donate them to pseudo-science.

    Will it blend?

    Farout Foolio on
    2tyFzTC.png

  • The Black HunterThe Black Hunter The key is a minimum of compromise, and a simple, unimpeachable reason to existRegistered User regular
    edited September 2008
    Farout Foolio wrote: »
    Donate them to pseudo-science.

    Will it blend?

    they went in totally the wrong direction with that show

    Will it penetrate a cow at 200 yards?

    The Black Hunter on
  • DrFrylockDrFrylock Registered User regular
    edited September 2008
    You can set up a Linux or FreeBSD cluster and run multiple instances of an application or MPI-based parallel applications on it. You could also create a high-volume web hosting solution or something like that. However, before you do, consider the substantial power and heat costs of running 14 machines all the time.

    DrFrylock on
  • bowenbowen Sup? Registered User regular
    edited September 2008
    DrFrylock wrote: »
    You can set up a Linux or FreeBSD cluster and run multiple instances of an application or MPI-based parallel applications on it. You could also create a high-volume web hosting solution or something like that. However, before you do, consider the substantial power and heat costs of running 14 machines all the time.

    A 500 MHz machine is likely to produce very little heat compared to machines now, but the power consumption is also reasonably higher to offset that.

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • supabeastsupabeast Registered User regular
    edited September 2008
    In my experience old low-end Sparc hardware usually didn’t justify the cost of keeping it powered on. Yeah you could always use them with *BSD/Linux as custom network appliances, but it would be a lot less expensive to just buy one dual-CPU PC, pack a lot of RAM in it, and run everything as virtual machines. Clustering might sound cool, but if you don’t normally work with clusters you’re just wasting time and energy, because once the cluster is running you won’t have anything to do with it.

    Personally, I’d contact local *nix user groups and see if there are developers who want them for testing code.

    supabeast on
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