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The Cray XD1 System operating system is Linux

The first Cray-1(R) system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory.

Good luck.

The Cray X1 uses spray evaporative cooling. Dielectric coolant is sprayed over PCBs and then coolant evaporates. It makes possible to use something like 65 W/cm power densities.

One needs, however, hermetic chasis, so your average PC box is not sufficient.

I've been patiently waiting for the release of Thief 3 and/orDoom 3 before updating my game PC. It looks like the game will be out before the hardware though, but it illustrates that sitting tight will get you more bang for the buck.

Of course when Duke Nukem Forever comes out you could likely buy a Cray machine for $24.95.

What about the Cray(formerly Tera) MTA system? These were hitting the supercomputing community at least 5 years ago...

Multithreading at Cray has been around a few years. It's actually a Terra Computing development, but they bought Cray and took the name. The MTA-1 was released a few years ago, and they are now selling the MTA-2. The multithreading is far beyond what Intel is doing: 128 threads per processor, interleaved so that memory is always running at full bandwidth. Looks like an interesting architecture, if you already have parallelized code.

10000 Opterons in an SMP?? OK, Red Storm isn't SMP, but Opteron has hardware to make it natively scale to 8 way. You can engineer your own glue logic (like intel does with the Xeon which only natively goes to 2 way) to make it scale beyond this. Once you get beyond a few thousand processors, you need a different kind of parallel architecture (regardless of CPU) like NUMA, cc:NUMA, COMA, some kind of low-latency clustering etc.

As for fanboy crap, we'll see.

Intel may come back strongly indeed, but at the cost of billions of dolars, the resigning of itanic to a very small niche (a few thousands of CPUs sold a year) and being forced to adopt their main competitor's (and hitherto underdog) architecture.

I'd rather have an early Cray system. Park it in front of the TV and you can get rid of the Barcalounger.

I'd rather have an early Cray system. Park it in front of the TV and you can get rid of the Barcalounger.

I'd rather have an early Cray system. Park it in front of the TV and you can get rid of the Barcalounger.

Well, I work for one of the companies that sells "classified" computers to the government. Typically, the sale itself isn't classified (especially since Cray is a public company) and sometimes, there's even a press release (that's one of ours from this spring). What "classified" usually means is that access to the system and the data on the system is classified. I don't have a security clearance, hence I can't look at, say, a crash dump from one of those sites. So, for your questions:

1) The NSA, Army, various other US and foreign government agencies.

2) Cray, SGI, IBM, HP (look at the Top 500 list for a good reference) and others. The Top 500 even lists a number of systems as "classified".

3) Uh, well, people *do* know about them.

I think if a Cray "decided" to make another computer the actual computer community's responses would be more along the lines of "WTF?????"

Odd that they have 16$ million in orders then.

"completely flouronics cooled. The cooling fluid, made by 3M, allowed the whole computer to be immersed in the electrically insulated fluid, and yet conduct the heat away by conduction and ebullient vaporization. It looked much like a fish tank."

Quoted from gcocco software, inc

Ordinary off the shelf microprocessors don't have the bandwidth to memory or bandwidth to other processors to simulate complex problems. NEC's machine is a Vector architecture (SX-6), similar to the kind you see from the Cray X1. Vector architectures are a SIMD-style processor.

But seriously, Cray is about 75 miles south from me. It would be really cool to take a tour of their plant and see the X-1 in person. At best my dual PIII 1GHz machine is good for about 640 MegaFlops, but just one of the X-1 node modules is 50 GigaFlops =) X-1 video

What is a supercomputer? Look here for an explination. What can we use them for? Curing evil diseases.

These are available here. This might give you ideas as to what kind of staff works on one of these machines.

I'd also like to point out that Cray has been vigorously searching for qualified individuals. I wouldn't know this officially; I check their site out every month or so. Positions get filled quickly!

Oh hell, just read their site. It has enough information about what they do :)

What is a supercomputer? Look here for an explination. What can we use them for? Curing evil diseases.

These are available here. This might give you ideas as to what kind of staff works on one of these machines.

I'd also like to point out that Cray has been vigorously searching for qualified individuals. I wouldn't know this officially; I check their site out every month or so. Positions get filled quickly!

Oh hell, just read their site. It has enough information about what they do :)

What is a supercomputer? Look here for an explination. What can we use them for? Curing evil diseases.

These are available here. This might give you ideas as to what kind of staff works on one of these machines.

I'd also like to point out that Cray has been vigorously searching for qualified individuals. I wouldn't know this officially; I check their site out every month or so. Positions get filled quickly!

Oh hell, just read their site. It has enough information about what they do :)

What is a supercomputer? Look here for an explination. What can we use them for? Curing evil diseases.

These are available here. This might give you ideas as to what kind of staff works on one of these machines.

I'd also like to point out that Cray has been vigorously searching for qualified individuals. I wouldn't know this officially; I check their site out every month or so. Positions get filled quickly!

Oh hell, just read their site. It has enough information about what they do :)

The home page at Cray for the Cascade project.

There are some interesting PDFs there. Chew, mull, and consider.

Also consider what Horst Simon, head of NERSC said here too.

Interesting to note is that #3, #6, and #8 are all linux clusters. All three of which are at Livermore.

Cray's X1 also debuted, but it was much lower @112. However, it ought to be noted, that the examples out so far are only 60 processors at tops. As soon as the money gets ponied up, prolly at ORNL, they'll be waaaay up towards the top. My guess is, if all goes as planned, they'll be at #15 by year's end.

What I find exciting these days is actually the High Productivity Computing Systems Effort, the Blue Planet or Blue Gene. These are a little ways off from being on the Top500 list yet though. :D

I do wish there were more SC companies doing hardware development in the US. I love Cray, but a single vendor smacks of eggs in one backet syndrome...So, geeks, if ya wanna start a startup with a design, go for it...Betcha the NSA (aka Cthuhlu of HPC) would be happy to sponsor ya...;)

That's not true at all. The MTA is not dead. Cray shipped two MTA-2 systems including a 40-processor system with 160GB of shared memory to the NRL last year.

That's not true at all. The MTA is not dead. Cray shipped two MTA-2 systems including a 40-processor system with 160GB of shared memory to the NRL last year.

That's not true at all. The MTA is not dead. Cray shipped two MTA-2 systems including a 40-processor system with 160GB of shared memory to the NRL last year.

Mod this guy up. He's really telling the truth!

Loosely coupled clusters like PDSF are great for work like what the high energy physics people do, like SNO.

However, somethings work better on vector architectures such as climate models and fusion work: there is a reason why the Spanish Met troops bought a Cray. Additionally, some chemistry, many fusion and several other codes work best on vector architectures.

There guys presented their global warming work where at my job. They've developed their climate code though as a parallel one. See here. One of the places that they have been running is on seaborg, an IBM RS/6000 with over 6k and near 7k processors.

Interestingly, the PCM guys presented what they wanted for an uber'puter. While it had massive amounts of storage, it was also a 500 *PETAFLOP* SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE machine.

*clickety clack* That'd be something like 166,666,666 Athlons. IDK of any interconnects that handle that. Can you imagine being an admin? Better hope you're good on rollerblades zipping to and fro replacing those oh-so-reliable commodity disks and CPUs...even if you have a .05% failure rate, that's still too damn much. As an admin, that'd be a huge waste of time. It'd also wreck havoc on the guys running stuff.

Or is that what grad students are for? To attempt such a silly thing and then admin it? ;)

Seriously tho. To get from here to their, we're going to need some exotic techs...not just more 'attack of the killer micros'.

3) Cray computer company has a full license but they no longer exist but SGI and Sun own the remains. So add Sun to the list again.

Not exactly. From the "Cray, Inc.web page:

"Cray Research merged with SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) in February 1996. In August 1999, SGI created a separate Cray Research business unit to focus exclusively on the unique requirements of high-end supercomputing customers. Assets of this business unit were sold to Tera Computer Company in March 2000. "

Cray still exists, doing what they do best.

If you look at the 1999 chart carefully, you'll notice that all the SGI machines in the top 150 are Cray vector computers. SGI got out of the vector supercomputer business a few months after this chart was compiled, selling all its Cray IP to Tera Computer. So even if this line of computers had managed to maintain its dominance of the Supercomputer market, it wouldn't matter to SGI.

So much for your big conspiracy theory.

Maybe you've not heard of them then...;)

While having this kind of bandwidth would be nice, consumer grade computers let alone the hardware are beyond woefully inadequate. About all you could hope for would be a 100M/bit connection. This is assuming that the phone company/cable operator dosen't bend you over for the cost of said connection.

The only machine that I know of that could even utilize a connection this fast is a Cray X1

The Cray T3E is cooled with fluorinert. The heat is then dumped into cooling water with an external heat exchanger unit. The processor element modules (PEMs) - a board with 8 alpha processors 4 on the bottom mounted against an solid aluminium block and 4 on the top mounted upside down to the same block - slide into the processor cabinet and have quick release cooling hose couplings.

Like this:-)

RISC first showed up on the commercial radar screen almost twenty years when MIPS Computer Systems
was formed. But people at Stanford (and Berkeley, IIRC) had been publishing papers about
RISC for four or five years before that, and people at IBM were working on it even before that.

And the CDC 6600 was a RISC machine in the 1960s. If you don't believe me, ask Cray's Chief Scientist Burton Smith.

In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way. -- Alan Perlis

This is nothing new. The Cray MTA supports 128 threads per processor and can scale up to 256 processors in a single system.

And the OS is a BSD variant.

This is nothing new. The Cray MTA supports 128 threads per processor and can scale up to 256 processors in a single system.

And the OS is a BSD variant.

>>>>the coolant used is not water on these though iirc it's some sort of nonconducting liquid.

>>I'm pretty sure that was fluorinert.

Yup, here's Cray's Online System Installation Manual
A quote: "Cray computer systems use dielectric coolant (Fluorinert(TM) liquid) to cool the mainframe chassis (MFC)."

So if we're shaking in our boots (I haven't really noticed anyone shaking due to anything other than cold, myself), it certainly isn't because of memory bandwidth... (Whoops, just reread your comment and realized you were probably kidding - didn't get my coffee today :) )

Repeat after me: Seymour Cray

I think you were thinking of Seymore Butt.

erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.

They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.

erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.

They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.

erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.

They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.

Nowhere on that list do I see a Cray supercomputer c'mon SciAm, it's the dot-com boom! Everyone has millions to throw around!

err.. oh.. scratch that.

To be fair, if you don't need this machine.. don't buy it or think about it. SGI is a dying company and in the long term you'll get better support elsewhere.

I trust HP and Sun to be around longer than SGI though, and they won't fuck you over like SGI will.

A real supercomputer supports much faster I/O, higher interconnection bandwidth and lower interconnection latency.

And btw. the new Cray X1 delivers the performance of a all but the largest linux-clusters in a single cabinet (820 GFlops peak that is..). In terms of computing efficiency it makes even the Earth Simulator look pale. I am really looking forward to the next iteration of the TOP500, when the first X1 machines are included.

Heat and power... The Intel chips run cooler and user less power per TeraFlop (At the install date).

... not really impressive compared to this badboy:

http://www.cray.com/news/0204/xfersystem.html

Quote:
"The new system, compatible with Cray SV1e(TM) and Cray SV1ex(TM) supercomputers, includes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per second..."

If you want an extreme example of this concept, check out the Cray(formerly Tera) MTA system. It sports 128 threads per processor - that is, 128 complete sets of registers. The idea is to tolerate memory latency while still being able to keep your pipelines full. An intersting fact is that they use a flat memory architecture - no caches! The cost is they need a lot of bandwidth to keep data moving properly from memory to the registers...

Look at these previous Cray systems, and compare that to what we have now. Sure, 2GB of RAM was "Super-computer" territory in 1985, but today you can walk in and buy it for $200 at Best Buy.

To everyone who particpated: Thank you for helping, and not letting those CPU cycles go to waste. Projects and challenges like these are very important to really, really know what the state of the art is in computation.

here on Cray's website.