On 19-Aug-10 10:48 AM, Randall Walls wrote:

Greetings,

The company I work for has an IBM P-690 server that is in the process of being retired. It is still a viable server, and has seen almost 0 use (it was our failover machine). Unfortunately for us, this machine has little to no resale value, and will probably be junked. I'd rather it go to a good home, and having taken advantage of the work of the python development community for a number of years (we use python extensively in system admin and database work), I saw this as an opportunity to give back a little.

So, If anyone is interested in this machine, please let me know. We are looking at perhaps a November time frame for when it will be removed from our remote site. The P690 is no small machine, it is the size of a full rack and has 32 Power4 processors in it and takes (I believe) 2 or 3 phase 220 Volt power. It weighs nearly a ton. We are running AIX5.3 on it, but I believe that the machine is capable of running a PowerPC flavor of Linux as well. This would make a great test machine for python HPC modules or as a community box where developers could test their code against a PowerPC architecture. It has lots of life left and I'd rather see it put to use then thrown away.

Snakebite[1]'s always got an eye out for free hardware, but dang, that's one chunky piece of kit. I'll follow up in private. (And yeah, I'm still working on Snakebite, for those that are interested. Turns out hosting three racks of heavy-duty hardware in the corner room of a (graciously donated) science lab takes a bit longer than originally anticipated. Who would have thought.) Regards, Trent "no-news-is-good-news" Nelson. [1]: http://www.snakebite.org/