NeXTcube with 4 motherboards

I was digging through some old NeXT gear tonight and I found this beast. I totally forgot that I purchased this cube back in the day (https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=708). Thanks @helf! It has four 25MHz 040 boards with v66 ROMs and all RAM slots full. The backplane has been modified with jumpers by an unknown individual. I'm not sure that I would feel safe turning this on even if the power supply were new, much less 30+ years old. I guess that I could do the ATX conversion on the power supply with a 1000W unit, but I'm not sure the backplane traces would like that. I've never powered it up so I'm not sure how things are set up. It has a hard drive and MO drive. I have to admit that it looks like the perfect candidate for a Zilla powered chess champion.



 

I've gotten over the initial shock of finding this Cube, so it's time to throw rational thinking and personal safety out the window and build a machine to run 'Zilla.app'.  This is going to take some time and testing to figure out the best path forward. I have an extra 25MHz cube motherboard in case one is dead or fails during use, although it needs a good recapping. There's a new $15 network switch that may or may not work for this application, we'll see. I also have a BlueSCSI v2 on the way for testing.

Since there's no man page for Zilla I looked in the app folder and there are six pages of documentation. It also contains some sample programs for Zilla, so at least there's a starting point.

There's not really any point to all of this other than to see if the venerable 983 power supply starts on fire, but it will be fun to check out the Zilla app that pioneered distributed computing.



I'm not too sure about these flat Ethernet cables but time will tell.

I think each board is 25w, so you should be fine as long as you don't go crazy on scsi devices.

Ah, that's good to hear. Thanks for that. I'm thinking about having one BlueSCSI drive per board. The drives don't have a power connector, so they take power from the SCSI bus as I understand. I'll have to look at the power draw of those but I think it's pretty low. I'm trying to avoid NetBooting to speed things up.

Please keep us updated Nitro!

I wonder if it'd be possible to have 2 boards and 2 dimensions in the same case? I've never seen that done.

Quote from: gtnicolI wonder if it'd be possible to have 2 boards and 2 dimensions in the same case? I've never seen that done.

I think that would be possible but it's just a guess on my part. It would be fun to try. Four LCD monitors, two keyboards, two mice, two sound boxes, one cube. :)

Quote from: dramirezPlease keep us updated Nitro!

I'll do that. This will probably be a slow build as free time is becoming more difficult to find now. I'm planning to design a 3D printed mounting bracket in SolidWorks to mount a BlueSCSI drive to each motherboard, somewhere between the CPU and RAM slots as shown below. Then it will just need a short SCSI cable to the mainboard. That leaves the Ethernet ports available for Zilla inter-node communications. It'll be fun to see if it all works. I started putting together some Zilla information for those interested:
https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/Zilla/

I disassembled the cube yesterday and cleaned out the interior. Yikes! The dead optical drive was replaced with a slot load DVD SCSI drive. The drive faceplate was painted satin black years ago as detailed in another thread. The original hard drive was backed up and set aside. I added a temporary Compact Flash IDE > SCSI drive to use for setup and testing. The NeXTcube case is a little beat up and missing the front logo so I'm going to move the parts to a nicer cube.



Next up is to build a mono Y cable. This is going to be ugly so wish me luck.



Richard Crandall (https://www.reed.edu/physics/faculty/crandall/) created an impressive computation network of fifty NeXT machines (https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/Zilla/The_NeXT_Computer_as_a_Physics_Machine.pdf) he called Godzilla. Since the cube is being set up to run his 'Zilla.app', this fits in nicely with the theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muUZjovOFRg

Where did you cable the cable to make this Y-cable? I'm planning on trying to make some custom cables myself.

Quote from: TristinAEvans on September 25, 2023, 12:26:59 PMWhere did you cable the cable to make this Y-cable? I'm planning on trying to make some custom cables myself.

I used a cheap cable from Amazon and the resulting Y cable produced a poor quality image. Considering the amount of time it took to create the Y cable I should have chosen a higher quality cable. I would recommend contacting Rob if you need one.

Quote from: Nitro on September 25, 2023, 07:21:39 PMI used a cheap cable from Amazon and the resulting Y cable produced a poor quality image. Considering the amount of time it took to create the Y cable I should have chosen a higher quality cable. I would recommend contacting Rob if you need one.

I'm actually looking to 'make' my own NeXT-branded SCSI cable. Hence why I asked. I cannot for the life of my find the one that was supposed to come with my Color Printer, but I did find one that had the chord cut, so I'm going to make a mold out of it to recreate them. I just need to find a cable good enough to carry the SCSI signal.

This is the cable that I used: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RBJVNRV (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RBJVNRV)

It was interesting to hear Steve mention putting 4 processor boards in a cube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I&t=9458s

Oh man @Nitro ! I forgot I sold it to you lol.

I havent been on the forum in years. I've spent the last several years regretting selling my NeXT gear :(

Quote from: gtnicol on March 18, 2023, 12:38:02 PMI wonder if it'd be possible to have 2 boards and 2 dimensions in the same case? I've never seen that done.

Should be. May not work for a single instance but if you adjust the backplane again so the Bus slots are 0/1 and 0/1 you could run two independent systems with dimensions in one cube.

@Nitro

Can you imagine this with 4x PiStorms? I reeeeeeeeally want to get another NeXT soon and a PiStorm and start working on that. Has anyone messed with that yet? I've been out of the loop for... what? Jeez, 15 years? *feels old*

Quote from: helf on December 12, 2023, 10:31:19 AMOh man @Nitro ! I forgot I sold it to you lol.

I havent been on the forum in years. I've spent the last several years regretting selling my NeXT gear :(

I totally forgot about it until I was going through some NeXT stuff in the basement and rediscovered it.  :o

Welcome back!

Quote from: helf on December 12, 2023, 10:42:48 AM@Nitro

Can you imagine this with 4x PiStorms? I reeeeeeeeally want to get another NeXT soon and a PiStorm and start working on that. Has anyone messed with that yet? I've been out of the loop for... what? Jeez, 15 years? *feels old*

I have the NeXT system you seek :) good to have you back !

I made a little progress on this project over the last few days. All four of the boards were recapped in a marathon recapping session. The batteries were replaced as well, and silicone BNC protector caps were added too. After the recap all of the boards booted successfully with no errors. Whew!

Simply beautiful stuff.  Gonna be a powerhouse when it's all said and done!

This reminds me of when I put 4 Radius Rockets in my Quadra 950... Poor machine was overheating and the stock psu hated it if you ran it too long.

I wonder if the NRO (US gov) had one of these to help with image processing.

Would be interested in some SQL benchmarks.