Cray for Sale - Cheap - Some Assembly Required

"For quick sale: Supercomputer of distinguished pedigree, a CRAY Y-MP C90, one of the world's most powerful only seven short years ago, an extremely reliable workhorse for R&D computing. Get the jump on your competitors! Bring this black & gold beauty home to your research center or lab today!" Read the story or place your bid. ... If you've ever wanted to go to the top of the distributed.net stats, here's your chance.

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Showdown: Cray Y-MP vs. Penguin Computing Server

[Dr. Zowie]

For a few moments I seriously considered that my lab might want this beast -- we do a fair amount of computing on a Beowulf cluster now, and I'm anticipating more need for cycles in years to come. But even at the opening price of $35,000, the machine doesn't compete well with commodity workstations anymore.

I went over to Penguin Computing and priced their eight-Pentium-III rackmount server with all the trimmings. It came to $70,000 for a system that comes surprisingly close to the Cray in power.

The Penguin Computing system has 8 Pentium III 550 MHz processors (with 1MB L2 cache each). If you were buying a real system, you'd probably try to use the much nicer Athlon series, but you'd certainly get something closer to a gigahertz from either AMD or Intel. Either processor has multiple pipelines, so you're likely to get more than 1 FLOPS per MHz of processor speed in optimized applications. You could expect perhaps 0.6 - 1.2 GFLOP per processor with this system, or 1-2 GFLOP with a system that used higher clock speed (Athlons might deliver higher pipelining multipliers?). Multiply by eight processors, and you find you should be able to expect 10-16 GFLOPS out of the rackmount server. The Penguin Computing machine has a fully cross-linked bus, so RAM bus contention is probably about equally problematic between the two machines. The PC machine has 2GB of memory (compared to the Cray Y-MP's 4GB), but this may be extensible (at ~2K/GB). The Magnus has dual 75GB hard drives, easily matching the Cray's disk space, but it also has a gigabit fiber link and a kickass graphics card, which the Cray lacks.

So the rackmount Magnus system offers comparable performance to the Cray, at twice the initial bid for the Cray (a reasonable estimate for the final price).

Now let's consider additional costs. The Cray requires that unspecified pieces of paper be signed to satisfy the U.S. government, adding unknown bureaucratic cost. The Magnus does not. Shipping and installing the Cray will require thousands of dollars. The Magnus requires about a hundred dollars. The Cray requires special power and a cooling system. The Magnus dissipates about a kilowatt and hence can get by with an extra HVAC vent. It does notrequire special power. The Magnus, dissipating about 1kW of power, would require perhaps $60/month for electricity; the Cray, with at least a factor of 10 more power, requires at least $600/month (plus the added cost of cooling the dinosaur pen).

So the Cray sounds fun to get, but (surprise!) it just doesn't stack up once the inconvenience factor is added in.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Even an I-Opener is in the same ballpark these days as a VAX 11/785 -- at least for memory and raw FLOPS.

Re:Sieze the power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I actually work at PSC (the group selling the system) and I have to say its a damn fine computer. You should all buy one now. Seriously though, this is not a linux box and the possibility of porting linux to it would be a daunting (if not impossible) task. I'm also not sure that the current set of licenses for the OS and other tools found on the machine are transferable. You'd also have a devil of a time installing this. The power requirements are outstanding. Not only do you have to deal with the power draw, cooling issues, wireing issues and so forth... You would also need to rewrite most any program you wanted to run on the sucker if you wanted it to use the full capabilities of the machine. How handy are y'all with FORTRAN? And yes, there is a good chunk of precious metals in this box in the work of wiring and connectors. It would cost much more to extract them then the value of the metals. And no, we can't ship this outside of the United States and I don't know about any restrictions on sales to foreign nationals. Lastly... Quake? What the hell are you smoking?

man...

[nomadic]

Imagine a Beowu--ok, I'll stop.
--

Having a Cray gets you a discount on power

[CoderDevo]

Actually, you are right, you do get a wholesale rate. Part of the requirements of running one or more Crays, as I have done, is to have sufficient backup power. We had 12 battery backup units, each with 32 car batteries. That would keep the Crays running for 4 minutes. After that the 3 12-cylinder deisel engines would be running at full speed and supply power endlessly.

When we had hot days in Minnesota, the local power company would call us and ask us to switch to deisel power so they could use their energy to power everyone else's air conditioners. In return, we got a major discount on power.

Note: the 4 story building takes up a whole block, but has no furnace. Even in the dead of a Minnesota winter, the Crays heated the whole building including the indoor parking ramp...and we still needed to vent heat out via fans.

Re:Sieze the power.

[jlg]

We could have the first community-owned supercomputer. Imagine the possibilities...

Well this is kind of a good idea, but you will be happy to know that it has already been done.

The US government spends millions of dollars on supercomputers every year. Some of the computers are for Classified projects, but many of them are for research purposes. These research computers are like a national computing resource. You paid the tax money for them and, if you're so inclined, you can probably use them. If you think you have a project that would benefit from a supercomputer, you can apply for time on one.

If you buy your own Cray you'll be guaranteed time on it, but you'll also be burdened with maintenance and upgrades.

Try these links:

NPACI Allocations

www.sdsc.edu

www.ncsa.edu

Original cost = 30.5M

[cheshire_cqx]

According to this article the original cost of a Cray Y-MP C90 was $30.5 million.

Some specs from utk.edu :

• 4.1 ns Clock Cycle
• 15.6 Gflops/s maximal
• 16 GB main memory
• 12 GB/s single proc. memory bandwith
• 2-16 processors

Apparently, today's fastest supercomputers are at about 12.3 teraflops! Still, I bet the power bill on the C90 still packs a punch! (But at least you won't need a heater in the winter!)

---
In a hundred-mile march,

Ever _used_ a C-90?

[plambert]

I ran the original distributed.net RC5 client on one CPU of an 8-cpu C-90. It got about 85Kkeys/sec. Yes, that's _85_. Not 600+ like intel processors of the time get.

C-90's do vectors. They don't do integer work. vi? slow as a dog. emacs? slow as a dog. CFD simulations? it'll knock your socks off.

Most people were very surprised when they would log in and see how _slow_ it was running a shell. Think 2-3 seconds to get a response to the 'date' command.

Would you use a sprint car to go to the grocery store? Wouldn't get you there any faster than my Geo Metro, would it?

C-90's are incredible machines; the details would fill you with awe. But given that there's no hardware documentation available, and hence no OS's other than COS and Unicos for them, and limitations like _no MMU_, it's really only useful for batch processing of vector work, i.e. floating point.

It'd make a kick-ass rendering back-end, if you could get someone to write the software. Otherwise, leave it alone.

--plambert

I'll buy if..

[BLiP2]

There real question here is, does the seller except payment by paypal? ;)

Re:Why buy CRAY when you can have a G4?

[fgodfrey]

This is the same kind of comment that pops up every time there's an article talking about real supercomputers. The big difference is that you will *never* see 3 gigaflops on a G4 outside of some specialized benchmark. When you're on a real Cray, you're usually striding through so much data that the processor cache is totally useless (vector Crays before the SV1 [or maybe the J90] didn't have a cache). That means that you fall back on the bandwidth of the memory bus, which was not designed for memory references on almost every clock cycle.

In addition, the Cray is going to push a lot more stuff between disk and memory than that G4. Not important? Well, try dealing with several hundred gigabyte files constantly and disk performance becomes an issue.

Basically, the Cray is designed to run at or near peak performance constantly. The G4 (and all other personal computers) are not.

Also, it takes 8 G4's to equal a Cray from 1991. That's pretty good for an almost 10 year old machine...