Supercomputer collectors are like the mainframe collectors, they like to keep a low profile other than the Cray-Cyber folks in Munich.
Those guys are cool, and I appreciate them putting notes online. My Crays had their hard disks removed and destroyed (came from high side / govt contractor / nuclear engineering for war machines.) When it came to trying to get info to re-install the OS I found that every collector I could find with a working machine -- it came to them with the OS installed and everything :-)
I have Unicos for the J90 series but I'm not 100% sure the release and stuff I have is compatible with my machine. It kernel panics on install boot -- could be a config thing or it could be the binaries I have are for some other version / iteration / etc.
I worked around a number of Cray employees as well and they had no idea.
I don't know what they do for software. We tried getting it with the last Cray we got, and got nowhere getting it released.
Yep, I hit the same thing. Cray was willing to write me permission to use though -- they faxed me document saying I was okay to run my system and such but they obviously weren't going to fork over the OS. At this point Cray had already switched hands and was out of the custom computer business and in the PC cluster business I think.
I wouldn't be surprised if Unicos like IRIX has licensed components in it and they can't distribute it even with it being old.
I was just in California / Silicon Valley for work and got to hang with some ex-SGI people that are friends of friend and I was asking them what happened to all the SGI documentation and stuff on the proprietary graphics systems and such -- any chance of it ever being cleared for release / does it still exist / etc. I think one of the guys might of mentioned you! But he talked as if much of that documentation was gone.
-- Ethan O'Toole
