At the very start of my career I worked on an Oracle database running on a Sequent server running if I recall 6x 80486s. We decommissioned it for Y2K and I remember playing wolf3d on it before it was to be... well I’m not sure what it’s fate was. I do have fond memories of that system and thus can appreciate your fondness for the Aquanta. Wish I could offer more help.

There's still a few partial pages available on the Unisys Wayback archive

Specs - https://web.archive.org/web/20000707221647/ht … ervers-xr6.html

Tech Brief 1 (Intel MPS / System Overview) - https://web.archive.org/web/20001006223456/ht … ary/wp-xr6.html

Tech Brief 2 (Ten-Way System Architecture) - https://web.archive.org/web/20001006195316/ht … /wp-tenway.html

donkom wrote on 2020-08-04, 01:11:

[...] I cannot understand how this would scale farther

Just hypothesizing it's conceptually quite simple:

PPro's internal logic supports clusters of 4, so you do 3 CPUs and the glue switch, as you describe with the /6. However instead of the glue just connecting two of those groups of 3 CPUs, the glue itself is connected in a 4-way group, so each glue switch is connected downstream to three PPro CPUs and upstream to three other glue switches, giving you a total of 12 CPUs.

Now, to actually implement that is quite another matter, but the kind of people who could do that certainly worked at Unisys at the time.

and still be compatible with standard operating systems like Windows NT 4.0. The ASCI Red supercomputer was built using these chips, breaking the teraflop barrier, but supercomputers always beat to their own drum.

Regular MS NT 4.0 HALs went up to 8 CPUs max, but vendors of this sort of system wrote custom HALs, Compaq wrote a 32 CPU one at one point. That said, it's unlikely that people using this sort of monster in PPro days would have run Windows on it. ASCI Red ran different OS like Teraflops OS and Cougar, custom made for the hardware. Linux was also ported to work on ASCI Red, but its performance was significantly lower than Cougar.

Very interesting!
from a quick read of the Tech Brief 1 linked above it looks like the HAL somewhat emulates a cluster to get around the CPU limit.
I guess that would be the sensible way to go with the amount of RAM and CPU's been talked about here far surpassing typical servers of the time .
but yeh, thanks for the information. Really like this old enterprise stuff although sadly most of it has long gone forever

Swiego, thanks very much for the links!

In one of the tech briefs, we get a confusing clue: "The Aquanta XR/6 system uses processor boards that contain two Pentium Pro processors and an L3 cache module. The system can support a maximum of five processor boards (or 10 processors)."

This was for their initial 10-way system, later upgraded to 12-way. That would make sense to have four triple-CPU boards (as dionb describes). But there are five boards? Why didn't they go to town and make a 15-way system? I also found it interesting that the maximum amount of memory was cut down to 4GB when in a 12-way configuration. It also seems like the original 10-way system was not built around 1M Pentium Pros, but the 512K versions.

I'm sure there was so much special glue, both in hardware and software, to make this all work. I'm sure that my attempts to run Linux on my 6x6 system could be improved with custom code that no longer exists in modern software. I recall something about the ASCI Red having different operating systems for different segments of the computer. Would have loved to dumpster dive after the upgraded it to Pentium II OverDrives or when it was decommissioned.