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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.
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?
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
According to this article the original cost of a Cray Y-MP C90 was $30.5 million.
Some specs from utk.edu :
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!)
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In a hundred-mile march,
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
There real question here is, does the seller except payment by paypal? ;)
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