As I have been looking for a cube, and studying them more closely, this question came up. From the back it appears that a cube has 4 "slots" in which to place a board. I know that the normal motherboard is in the rightmost, and a dimension is in the leftmost (if you have one), but can you put more. Could you put two dimensions in the leftmost slots? Mabey one PAL and one NTSC, for example. Can you put more than one motherboard in a cube, and have some sort of "cluster" type system. I do not know how the video/KB/Mouse would work, since it would only be attached to one. Perhaps you could access them remotely over the network. Can the power supply system handle more than two boards? Is there space for additional hard disks?
Just curious
Chef
I know it's been talked about and diagrammed, but I can't find what I thought I was looking for..
This actually has more specifc information:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.hardware/browse_thread/thread/ff9c272350d94d66/a95d643bbdffb315QuoteI have a cube with 4 boards in it (1x040, 3x030), and it is working just
fine... and I am thinking about building a system with the following
configuration (nice to have spares flying around ;-):
1x040-25 board
2x030-25 boards
1xNeXTdimension board
Will this work? How does the NeXTdimension find its host?.. At some point
the CPU board attempts to bootstrap the ND, but what exactly determines which
of the boards will bootstrap it and where is this information kept?
Quote from: "nextchef"As I have been looking for a cube, and studying them more closely, this question came up. From the back it appears that a cube has 4 "slots" in which to place a board. I know that the normal motherboard is in the rightmost, and a dimension is in the leftmost (if you have one), but can you put more. Could you put two dimensions in the leftmost slots? Mabey one PAL and one NTSC, for example. Can you put more than one motherboard in a cube, and have some sort of "cluster" type system. I do not know how the video/KB/Mouse would work, since it would only be attached to one. Perhaps you could access them remotely over the network. Can the power supply system handle more than two boards? Is there space for additional hard disks?
Just curious
Chef
You can fit up to 3 dimensions into an 040 cube. No idea about an 030 but it would be painful to say the least.
With some tricks (basically messing with the backplane) you can add an 030 board to an 040 cube as long as it has no NBIC fitted, machine won't boot with two logic boards each with it's own NBIC, hence the reason you have to use an 030, all 040's have NIBC fitted ex factory and won't boot without them.
Lots of good info in the usenet post linked to. And as brams stated, you could put three dimension boards in a 040 cube.
So any extra 030 boards are basically just getting power from the system, and nothing else. Each would then act as its own workstation, and you could hook up monitors and such to each and have 4 systems running from one cube? I guess then each would need its own hard disk or OD. Is there room in the cube for 4 hard drives?
I am intrigued at the possibilities.
Chef
I once read about someone who hooked up two motherboards in a cube and they worked together via the mozilla.app for rendering. Was it mozilla? Whatever that app was for sharing workload over several Nexts
Quote from: "nextchef"So any extra 030 boards are basically just getting power from the system, and nothing else. Each would then act as its own workstation, and you could hook up monitors and such to each and have 4 systems running from one cube? I guess then each would need its own hard disk or OD. Is there room in the cube for 4 hard drives?
I am intrigued at the possibilities.
Chef
It's basically networked over ethernet between the 030 and the 040, I guess you could run two monitors but It should/would appear as two NeXTcubes and you'd need two keyboards and mice etc, unless you used NXhost or whatever it's called.
I suppose it was OK in the day if you needed the extra power the 030 might give you and you had one spare.
I think the app is called
Zilla!.app