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The best thing SGI ever sold though (back in 1997) ran Solaris. Too bad they didn't realize what they were selling.

I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?

About weekly, I'll check out http://amasci.com/ (amateur science and electricity stuff), http://en.wikipedia.org/ (duh), http://www.cray-cyber.org/ (free supercomputer access), http://www.hpcalc.org/ (HP48/49/etc calculator stuff), etc., to check for new stuff. I'll check my http://facebook.com/ and http://myspace.com/orangesquid (shuddup) messages about weekly. From time to time I might browse http://www.amazing1.com/ (catalog which has Tesla coils and stuff, though they're not actually the best place for parts/kits/devices) or search for scientific equipment or old unix systems on http://www.ebay.com/ (see the Used SGI Buying Guide FAQ, etc).

I also check up on some of my friends via http://os.livejournal.com/friends every few days.

Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.

Ooh, just found Emulab - looks promising!! Offers access to lots of PCs running various OSs.

Also, forgot to mention access to Cray Unicos (and other supercomputers!) and pdp unix preservation society (not just PDP images).

See http://www.cray-cyber.org/ for a sample of some former supers that you can gain public access to.

Actually, given that I'm not really in a 'buying mood' right now, I'd love to see some more interesting/exotic processors thrown into the mix. The one I'd really like to see are some SPARCs, although I don't think they'd do very well on the benchmarks that are being used (they seem to favor single-thread performance). But some big iron -- especially old big iron -- would be fun for comparison value. We always hear glib comparisons between modern desktop computers and the mainframes of the past, but I've never seen any hard evidence of how they would stack up.

I guess the place to start would be with these guys' Cray YMP ... they even have gcc and GNU make installed, so I don't think it would be too hard to get the SPEC CPU benchmark series running on it, although I'm not sure whether to get the fairest score if you'd want to use the Cray-supplied optimized C and f77 compilers, instead of gcc.

Somebody has to have done this before... but searching on the spec.org site didn't turn up anything for Cray.

http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/stg/pub/P/par_alg.htm l/

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=366 887&rl=1/

http://static.cray-cyber.org/Documentation/Vector_ P.pdf

These guys offer open access to the Cray machines they have online. You have to get permission from them to do certain things but that's still a small price to get access to a cray.

Not exactly the same thing as the article but definitely a way for the average joe to learn about supercomputers without building one himself.

Again, kind of answered my own question here. Check out http://www.cray-cyber.org/general/start.php/ for a hosting provider in Germany that happens to have a Cray Y-MP EL online for external users with free accounts. Though, you do have to tell them what you want to use the account for and what not, so if you tell them to root kit their l33t 5up3rc0mpu73r they may not let you play with their toys.

Before that was the Cray-2 (a.k.a World's most expensive aquarium")? In case anybody's interested, I believe they used Fluorinert as the liquid, as it wouldn't swell the PC boards, short anything out, or cause anything to corrode.

A note, the Cray-3 was created by Cray Computer Corporation of Colorado, whereas the Cray-1 was made by Cray Research of Wisconsin. In ~1990, Seymore wanted to start working on computers using gallium arsenide instead of silicon, since they could switch faster. Cray Research didn't want to try anything so revolutionary, so Seymore headed to Colorado with a group of people and started CCC. Unfortunately, they apparently made exactly one Cray-3, then folded.

Seymore Cray was quite the Übergeek.

Actually, they do, but they are referred to as vector processors rather than DSP's. Probably the most famous and the first was the Cray supercomputer. And there was also the INMOS "Transputer"

DSP's are optimised to handle streamed data of a particular maximum size (Eg. 4-element float point variables). Useful for image processing (red,green,blue,alpha) and 3D graphics(XYZW), but if you're modelling something like ocean currents, global weather, every data element is more than likely going to have more than four variables (eg. temperature, humidity, velocity, pressure, salinity, ground temperature), you may not get full optimisation.

Plus, you also need a means of getting all these processors to talk to each other. DSP's are nearly always optimised to operate in single pipelines, so don't need much communication support (eg. Sony Playstation 2). However, if you're designing a supercomputer system, the major bottleneck is the communication between processors (network topology). Some applications might only need adjacent processors to talk to each other (global weather simulation usually represents the atmosphere as a single large block of air, with sub-blocks assigned to seperate processors. Other applications might assign individual processors to different tasks, which complete at different rates (eg. the Mandelbrot set). A configurable network architecture allows the system to be used for many more different applications.