How the Sun Enterprise 10000 was born (2007)

Summary

A group of engineers in San Diego left their jobs at well established corporations (especially a large number of former NCR employees) to form their own company. They set out to build massively parallel computers with Sparc processors. The market they were targetting has traditionally been a hard one, and they had a hard time surviving. They were acquired by similar companies and reshaped several times, most notably their second to last acquisition by Cray Research, Inc.. They were also joined with several engineers in Beaverton, Oregon through these mergers. Under Cray's leadership, they produced a machine with 64 Sparc processors called the CS6400 (or more affectionately called the SuperDragon since it was an implementation of Sun's sun4d architecture, similar to what would be found in a SparcCenter 2000 computer from Sun). The CS6400 supported a feature called Dynamic System Domains, meaning that its multiple system boards could be electronically isolated into distinct sets (called domains), and that the partitioning could be changed dynamically while separate instances of the operating system were executing within each domain. Another feature called Alternate Pathing allowed SCSI and ethernet devices to be virtualized on top of pairs of SCSI and ethernet interface cards, allowing an operator to dynamically repartition system boards or even physically remove system boards from the chassis without interrupting I/O services provided to the end users. A relationship was established between the engineers who built the CS6400 and Sun Microsystems because their large Sparc based servers ran the Solaris Operating Environment. (Well, along with a few low level tweaks in the kernel to get Solaris to work on the slightly different hardware, and to support the Alternate Pathing feature and the Dynamic Reconfiguration feature that allows the kernel to release/claim resources as they're physically detached/attached.) When Cray was purchased by SGI, and while SGI analyzed what...