Making the UberComputer

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The ALR Revolution 6x6

    Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean here was a great opportunity to build a 6 processor computer, and it was hard to argue that it wouldn't be cool. It would firmly entrench the owner/builder into the top of the geek hierarchy. And of course my friends were up for it too, so how hard could it be, get the board, get the processors, pick up a couple of other little parts and bank it all golden right? If it were that simple this website wouldn't exist.

Note: these pages are just barely maintained. Consider this reference material on the 6x6.

The discussion forums are to allow information to be captured without my involvement - these are barely maintained as well. 

Success!  We have our first test system up and running!  For the past 4 days, the systems has run with no problems (4 processors, 96 megs of RAM).  Updates exist on almost all pages, as we learned a lot!

And so we begin:

    We got 3 of the boards for a very reasonable price on eBay they are ALR Revolution 6x6 motherboards, the top of the multiprocessor food chain in it's time, and still really fast! Here is a link to an ad, and some specifications (credit goes to ALR). If you are crazy enough to want to build one of these monsters also make sure that the board you purchase has the memory, serial, and the CPU cards as well as the motherboard. 

    After receiving the boards we came upon the first issue: power.  When ALR had made the boards they designed them to work with their proprietary case. In their case the power supplies plug into the case which then handles all the power routing issues. This works great and makes for easy redundancy. Unfortunately ALR/Gateway doesn't sell this model anymore (much less just the case). According to them this was a class 'A' case so the federal government wouldn't let them sell the case alone. Also when asked about the power connections and what voltage was going where we were basically told it is proprietary and we can't tell you. I guess the moral of the story there is not to expect any help from them. (That is also when we decided to build the website and share what we can find.)

    Next came CPUs and VRMs.  A little research found a source of both, and some Pentium Pro 180s were purchased for testing. (if you are going to blow something up, make it as cheap as possible...)

    Memory has turned out to be the biggest pain.  The motherboards came with DIMM cards, which were options that came later to the 6x6.  First we found that the strange DIMMs required were hard to find, then found that two of the three boards had factory defects.  The guy who sold us the boards was great about it, and we now have SIMM cards for testing.  The new cards take parity SIMMs, which are more expensive then regular SIMMs, but much easier to find then the weird DIMMs.

    Up to this point, you have not heard much about a case.  Well, the current plan is to worry about it when we get the board to fire up.  This board is real big, and the case real proprietary.  We will talk about what we come up with (suggestions have surfaced from Plexiglass to Legos) after we celebrate the first booting of the motherboard.

What we missed?

    If you have any information or questions please post in the forums and we will try and get it answered.  Also, if you have any information that is not on this page, let us know!  We are trying to gather everything we can on this incredible machine.