Sun E450 server officially vintage

[Dave McGuire]

On Jan 3, 2007, at 12:46 AM, Richard wrote:
> Owner's manual has a date of 1997...

   Unreal.  I know of dozens of these in production.  This "10 year"  
rule really just doesn't fit sometimes.

> Someone is giving one of these to me with 4 CPUs.

   What CPUs?

>   What should I do with it?  Its got no graphics,

   E450s were primarily designed to be servers, not workstations.   
But I know a guy (ahem Doc!) who has a very tasty workstation-config  
E450, rather drool-worthy.

   Depending on your network setup, I'd use it as a centralized  
server.  Mail, spam filtering, NFS (or samba if you're still running  
legacy Windows systems), etc.

> but I figure I could make it compute
> arbitrary precision deep Mandelbrot set zooms.

   Bad idea.  SPARCs, even the later UltraSPARCs, don't do very well  
in the floating point department.  But...if you could code up an  
integer-based routine it'd scream.  The dynamic range of the numbers  
required in these calculations is very, very small.  One thing that  
comes to mind is that Ciarcia did a nice integer implementation years  
ago, to run on 8051 microcontrollers.  I've looked at that project in  
some detail but haven't built one...yet.

           -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL