The Ware for November 2017 is the “Front Panel Display Board” from an Intel Paragon supercomputer. Many moons ago one of these was being decommissioned at MIT and I raided the cabinet for interesting-looking parts. I snagged a ginormous 5V power supply (the monster could pump out 400A @ 5V) and one of these front panel LED boards. As alluded to by some of the comments, this is the sort of LED board that gets designed when money is not an issue.
Nobody got quite close enough on this one to call a winner, so again this month we have a winner-less name that ware. I have a feeling, however, that next month’s should be a cinch :)
I was curious as to what these panels were used for. Here are a few (although low-res) images as to how the system looked:
http://dooki.com/supercomputers/intel/
To me that board looks more of a result from a marketing department than an engineering department :-)
Many thanks!
I’d been googling to try to find videos of it in action, naïvely thinking that many LEDs would it may be like a connection machine:
https://youtu.be/4VTxyRVmL5c?t=51
From the old AI lab? By the time I got to it, someone had raided the custom LSI controller chips from the backplane, rending the whole thing useless. So I got the rest of the LED panels. A lifetime ago…
Yah, from the old AI lab. I was hoping to nab one of the i860 boards but alas I was also too late…
Someone asked about this on reddit 5 years ago. He posted some nice pictures as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/ouply/intel_paragon_supercomputer_led_door_help/
OMG, 5V 400A power supply… “need one!!!!!1!!”
Will you post a few pics of it? Thanks!
no winner again? Man.. not easy