HELP W/ BUILDING MASSIVE COMPUTER

That was a good valid answer, I wonder if he understood what you meant?

Ask for plans ? The only way is stealing them ;-), because noone who produces such units would be so kind to hand them out for free - wasting manyears of development work and waiting for an identical product coming from china some days later.

I may even suggest..., buy one and then reverse engineer .

What's the physical size of a motherboard you are thinking about to be able to accommodate 200+ DIMMS that you require?

Have you ever built (or at least assembled) a desktop computer before? If not yet, then maybe start working with one first and learn from it.

"Have you ever built (or at least assembled) a desktop computer before?"

Can you imagine the size of the desk just for the MOBO. The monitor, etc. will be in the next county!

Back in the day there was a manufacturer that produced a modular peripheral box for implementing, at that time, massive amounts on online ram on an extended bus. That was in a the days of first generation memory modules and hard drives had very low transfer rates.

Unless captaingraybeard can clarify what the application for such a large amount of memory is, its difficult to recommend a good plan of action or reasonable alternative solution based on todays available technology.

What would be the purpose of such a unit?

I have never seen anything that size not even for a server. There aren't any programs requiring that much RAM. You'll never use 400g RAM for anything. Not even for NASA. You would need the space of about 4 motherboards alone to accommodate the DIMM's and that's not allowing for the CPU, graphics and other peripherals such as NIC or connections for HD's and powersupply.

Contact IBM customer service directly and maybe they can answer your question.

Are we forgetting the speed at which computer technology is accelerating? 15 years ago my hard drive was 128 MEG. I have a thumb drive 40 times that in my pocket right now. I'd say that there is no CURRENT application for so much RAM, but I won't be surprised when the need arises. Of course, it will surely be for a really cool game!

Maybe easier/cheaper to buy a part of the Storm botnet

Look into parallel computing and check out servers.

Pineapple

Just a quick question, and don't take this wrong, but your other post you say you don't have the knowledge to upgrade an eMachine to 2 Gig, yet you want to build a 'pooter with 400+ Gig? If you can't tell a processor how to handle memory it's designed to handle, how do you propose telling it how to play with 200 times more?

I'm not trying to be a richard, I truly am curious as to how this will play out.

I think the better way is, you should tell us about your purpose of using planned computer.

If you only want to find motherboard please contact to IBM, HP, NEC for mainframe server or ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI,...... for further informations.

What are you trying to run on that system?

Go and do a Google search on Massively parallel computers, Beowulf (no not the movie) OpenMOSIX and look at what your intending to do with it.

Also, DON'T SHOUT....

Do you know anything about computes?

the first limitation you will have is addressing range for the current range of processors, 32-bit XP can only address about 3.2-3.6Gigs of my 4G system, 64-bit can handle, and similar with 32-bit linux

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 3366496 kB

then there is the cooling, and the power requirements, then the laying of the power traces on the mobo, the equalization of track length, track size and transmission line termination, will the memory be directly on the mobo with BGA or on DIMM sticks? have you even looked in to the space requirements that would be needed for either design?

It would posisbly be better to look into the small CPU board design with 10G ports, it would have a CPU, RAM, Network, and run it in a cluster part, then when a module goes down, unplug repair/replace and the system stays alive.

Still, you have power and cooling to think of.