Slashdot Mirror
Cray's New Solid State Storage
Sivar writes: "Cray, a well known vendor of extremely fast supercomputing hardware, has introduced a storage system with a 224 GB capacity. The large size seems impressive, but the device can also transfer an unprecedented 80GB(!!) every second. That's more bandwidth than the main memory of most servers, and it's just for storage. For comparison's sake, a typical dual channel DDR motherboard has a bandwidth capacity of barely 4.2GB/sec." Yow.
I love logging into /. and seeing a headline that makes my draw jop. Its really cool.
I want one.
Need I say more? I want one!!!!
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
My second first post in 2 days. Glory be to me.
imagine these in RAID 0!
This is more of a conglomeration of current technology into a pricy solution, not so much a stellar advance.
Any spoon would be too big.
Does not say how fast it can write to it's storage medium. I'd be very interested to know.
Heh
-- Dan
w00t
I'm impressed.
Of course, it probably won't work on ordinary computers (after all, sticking that onto a SCSI bus would be sort of a waste), but eventually we'll get our hands on this stuff.
Anybody dare to ask how much it costs?
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-%/%| /%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-' \//%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh \%/|%
hhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh __,--
hhhhh _,-'hhhhh _,-'%(% ; %)%
hhhhh_,-'hhhhh _,-' %\%, %\
/ / ) _,-'hhhhhhhhhh'--%'
\__/_,-'
I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around
But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down
Now I'm playing it real straight, and yes I cut my hair
You might think I'm crazy, but I don't even care
Because I can tell what's going on
It's hip to be square
I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on TV
I'm working out most everyday and watching what I eat
They tell me that it's good for me, but I don't even care
I know that it's crazy
I know that it's nowhere
But there is no denying that
It's hip to be square
It's not too hard to figure out, you see it everyday
And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way
You see them on the freeway, It don't look like a lot of fun
But don't you try to fight it; "An idea who's time has come."
Don't tell me that I'm crazy
Don't tell me I'm nowhere
Take it from me
It's hip to be square
old enough to set the table, old enough to pass the meat
Dude, this is FAST! Of course, /. editors get paid the same even when they add nothing to the story.
Woo Hoo.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
fp
FP;)
I'm sure it will be out of reach of the average /. geek for a while... but it looks really cool
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Details: And maybe the first (!!), but I'm not going to get my hopes up.
Oh, and JonKatz is a child molester.
--
"Negative One, Troll."
A golden badge of honor,
worn on my penis.
now we just need to hope that their webpage is served up by one of these systems...
Why would I possibly want one? This is one of those too cool to be useful for mortals kinda things...
But wait! What if someone used it to write real time HDTV format to the disk on this? Maybe they should come up with super duper Tivo box? That would be cool...
d.
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! :-)
What you will find here:
How serious is Child Molesting?
How many child molesters are there?
How many children will be molested?
How can I tell if a child is being abused?
What should I do if a child tells me they are being abused?
What is anyone doing about this?
What can I do to help?
Child molestation is a national crisis. and 1 in every 42 children will become a missing child. There is one child molester per square mile.
Reports of child abuse continue to climb at a steady rate. In 1995, child abuse reports rose 1.7% exceeding 3.1 million.
There are 63,000 convicted first-time offenders of child molestation in California alone. Statistics show that these offenders are four times more likely than other violent criminals to recommit their crime.
Four million child molesters reside in the US.
A typical child molester will abuse between 30 and 60 children before they are arrested and will molester 380 during their lifetime
One1 out of every 3 girls and 1 out of every 7 boys will be molested at least once before the age of 18.
How can I tell if a child is being abused?
Most children are afraid to tell and will quickly justify any marks on their bodies. Even though a child may not talk about abuse, their behavior may indicate that something is wrong.
Some signs to look for:
Acting-out behavior--a child may be angry and become aggressive
Sleep disturbances, bedwetting, or nightmares
New fears toward a particular person or place
Unusual knowledge of sexual activities
Bruises, cuts, redness, or swelling
What should I do if a child tells me they are being abused?
If a child does tells you about abuse, it is a large step for them to take and handling it properly should help the child be reasurred that it was okay to tell.
Firstly, stay calm, find a private place to talk, quietly explain to the child that it was good for them to tell someone. Reassure them that you believe them and use the same words as the child to show that you understand and that you have heard them and are listening. Reassure the child that it is not their fault, and quickly report the abuse to your local
Child Protection Agency or police. If you think that the child is hurt, go to the nearest emergency room.
What is anyone doing about this?
The U.S. Dept. of Justice is helping New Jersey defend a state law, called "Megan's Law," requiring officials to notify a neighborhood when a child molester or other sex offender is released from prison and takes up residence in a community
How can I help?
There are many ways you can help.
Become knowledgeable about Child abuse.
Read some of the articles and know the signs of child abuse.
If you suspect a child is being abused - try and talk to the child.
Report it to the proper agency in your area.
If you have a web site...give some of your space to this issue.
Support the programs and organizations on the net that are helping abused children.
old enough to set the table, old enough to pass the meat
I'd say imagine a beowulf cluster of those, but...
a) I dont want to get smacked by someone
b) That thing puts the capacity of a beowulf cluster to shame...
Anyway, awesome piece of technology. Any drawbacks, anyone?
LOTR: Elijah Wood is a munchkin asshat. Yes, asshat. LOL.
run Linux? If so, can you image a... whops, someone beat me to that one, sorry.
I think this may be the first time I've ever read jaw dropping hardware specs on slashdot, and you could go out and buy it.
None on EBay yet...
Well, looks like I'll have to wait a few weeks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Star Trek: Voyager is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Star Trek: Voyager community when last month Nielsen confirmed that Star Trek: Voyager accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all viewers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Star Trek: Voyager has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Star Trek: Voyager future. The hand writing is on the wall: Star Trek: Voyager faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Star Trek: Voyager because Star Trek: Voyager is dying. Things are looking very bad for Star Trek: Voyager. As many of us are already aware, Star Trek: Voyager continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Tuvok is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Star Trek: Voyager producer Rick Berman states that there are 7000 viewers of Star Trek: Voyager. How many fans of Tuvok are there? Let's see. The number of Star Trek: Voyager versus Chakotay-specific posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Tuvok fans. Tuvok posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Chakotay-specific posts. Therefore there are about 700 Tuvok fans. A recent article put Seven of Nine at about 80 percent of the Star Trek: Voyager fanbase. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Seven of Nine fans. This is consistent with the number of Seven of Nine Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Paramount, abysmal ratings and so on, Star Trek: Voyager was ended as a series and the syndication rights were sold to another troubled company. Now that company is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house. All major surveys show that Star Trek: Voyager has steadily declined in the ratings. Star Trek: Voyager is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Star Trek: Voyager is to survive at all it will be among hardcore Star Trek nerd fucks who are hoping to see Seven of Nine in a bikini. Star Trek: Voyager continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time.
Star Trek: Voyager is dying.
Um. Woo. Christmas? Please? Blowjob?
I must own one of these. I simply can't live without it.
how many days worth of mp3s is that?
Here come all those lame "this'll barely hold my mp3 collection" jokes.
Damnit.
Please tell me that cray.com isn't slashdotted. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Ted Coppel is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Ted Coppel community when IDC confirmed that Ted Coppel market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Ted Coppel has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Ted Coppel is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Ted Coppel's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ted Coppel faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Ted Coppel because Ted Coppel is dying. Things are looking very bad for Ted Coppel. As many of us are already aware, Ted Coppel continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
All major surveys show that Ted Coppel has steadily declined in market share. Ted Coppel is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Ted Coppel is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Ted Coppel continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ted Coppel is dead.
Fact: Ted Coppel is dead
old enough to set the table, old enough to pass the meat
continued refinement and technical advances in the computing field. That's the real meat I like to see on /.
I can't wait for 2030 to see where technology ends up.
I really do want to see some real information about the underlying design of the stuff.
anyone else find it hilarious that the site is slashdotted?
:)
I know its probably hosted by someone else but come on just the idea that we slashdotted a cray is awesome
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
Get one of these, downgrade your system to 8MB RAM, and run everything from swap...
Watch your system's responsiveness double.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Anyone find this comment from the release kind of ironic?
The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second.
yum!
... they were running off of one.
SEATTLE (April 8, 2002) - Cray Inc. today announced the availability of the world's highest-capability expansion memory and data transfer system. 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-800 or more times faster than the 10- to 100-megabytes/second speeds typical with today's disk servers.
The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second. With their 32-gigabyte central memories and the new SSD system, Cray SV1(TM) series supercomputers now provide up to a quarter terabyte of ultrafast memory. They can also be linked to a virtually unlimited number of standard disk servers for additional capacity, and to other computer systems via high-speed networking.
"With the new SSD system, Cray SV1 series supercomputers can handle extremely large, data-intensive problems with unprecedented speed, convenience and cost-effectiveness," said Jerry Loe, Cray vice president of worldwide sales and service. "This will be particularly useful in bioinformatics, and for complex automotive and aerospace applications." The Cray SV1 series, named "Best Supercomputer" in 2001 by the readers of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine, includes special hardware features for bioinformatics.
"With the new SSD, bioinformaticists will be able to work with several copies of the Human Genome at a time, or perform whole genome comparisons, or pursue drug design and discovery, without wasting valuable compute time waiting for standard disk data transfers," said Jef Dawson, Cray's manager of bioinformatics development and marketing. "The SSD can keep up with the Cray SV1 parallel supercomputers' processors, which perform up to 12 operations per clock cycle."
Dawson said the SSD will benefit virtually any application requiring large data sets. "The popular automotive application MSC/Nastran ran 2.5 times faster using the new SSD capability. Applications that run 'out of core,' including the popular GAUSSIAN chemistry codes, are also well suited to the SSD. You can think of the SSD as the world's biggest cache memory, or the world's biggest I/O buffer. Either way, it offers the world a new capability."
There, it's been said.
They can also be linked to a virtually unlimited number of standard disk servers for additional capacity,
Yes, just in case you need extra capacity for your 224 gigabyte solid state harddrive. Sheesh.
I also like how they're using 'copies of the Human Genome' for their storage metaphor instead of 'copies of the Library of Congress'.
... a Beowulf cluster of these?
/.ers*
*ducks rotten tomatoes thrown by rabid
I'm sorry, but someone had to say it!
Don't forget the legalese on forward looking statements, and registered trademarks as well.
I wonder if this would work with my TRS-80...
I guess that using standard measurements (GB and GB/sec) just isn't intuitive enough! But why use the humane genome as a reference? Is that REALLY more intuitive to most people? Does anyone (besides geneticists) really understand how much information is in the human genome?
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
Terabytes, I want Terabytes... Say it with me now, Te-Ra-Bytes... No wait!o ol/bitsbytes.h tm
Petabytes, I want Petabytes... Say it with me now, Pe-Ta-Bytes... No wait!
Exabytes, I want Exabytes... Say it with me now, Ex-A-Bytes... No wait!
Zettabytes, I want Zettabytes... Say it with me now, Zet-Ta-Bytes... No wait!
Yottabytes, I want Yottabytes... Say it with me now, Yot-Ta-Bytes... No wait!
Googlebytes, I want Googlebytes... Say it with me now, Goo-gle-Bytes... No wait!
Uh, what comes after Googlebytes?
http://www.webstreetstudios.com/sch
To get the full bandwidth utilization out of one of these over a network, you would need at least 640 gigabit ethernet connections, and even that would work only if the cards transfered data at their peak theoretical bandwidth. In reality, you'd likely need a bare minimum of 800.
That'd be a great headline for Samba.org...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
IMLAY CITY - Little Ashlee Tallis toddled around the apartment pushing her purple and pink plastic grocery cart and smiling like she didn't have a care in the world.
Just 18 months old, she's too young to understand the burden on the shoulders of her parents, Dan and Dina Tallis of Imlay City. Since Ashlee had her first seizure at 9 months old, she spent time in four hospitals and underwent countless tests before her parents found out what was causing the daily seizures and what it would take to control them for the rest of her life.
The cause is hyperammonemia, one of the rarest forms of hyperinsulinism, a genetic disease in which the pancreas makes too much insulin.
There is no cure, but the disease can be controlled through daily glucose testing, regular visits to the hospital for checkups, a special diet, and taking a medication for the rest of her life that not only tastes terrible but causes lethargy and excessive hair growth. The side effect is dubbed werewolf syndrome.
"At one point, she was having 10 seizures a day," said Dina Tallis, 27. She said her daughter would lose all muscle control and be as limp as a little rag doll. "Her teeth were chattering - almost like insulin shock."
Life expectancy is normal if the disease is diagnosed and treated aggressively before brain damage occurs. Testing indicates Ashlee's brain is normal, but she's still at risk for such long-term problems as delayed development, seizures, cerebral palsey and blindness.
"This is nasty," said Dr. Paul S. Thornton, director of the hyperinsulinism program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where Ashlee was treated.
But the Tallis family has been buoyed by an outpouring of community support. Teachers in the Imlay City School District, where Dina teaches kindergarten, made a care package of snacks and books for the family's trip to Philadelphia, and the Imlay City United Methodist Church has scheduled an April 12 dinner to benefit the family.
The family has health insurance but has used up its savings for gas, hotel rooms and other expenses as they took off work to be with Ashlee. Dan Tallis, 34, is a meter reader for Detroit Edison.
"We tried really hard to be independent people, but it's hard when there are so many things working against you," said Dina, through tears.
Road to discovery
The Tallises believe the seizures began when they switched Ashlee's bottle from formula to milk. Unbeknownst to them, the milk and other high-protein foods were making their baby sicker.
"There were days when she would eat a whole plate of scrambled eggs," Dan Tallis said. "We look back now and we were basically poisoning her."
They also recall their baby seemed fussier than most, likely because she felt miserable much of the time.
"Her body was in turmoil," Dina said.
Ashlee suffered through a myriad of tests, some more painful to her parents than to her, while doctors tried to determine what was wrong. During some tests, Dina said, she would have to leave the room rather than watch.
"She got her fingers and toes picked a thousand times," her father said. The hardest time for him was when they had to put her to sleep for an invasive test.
"I was holding her and she looked at me like, 'What's going on?' It's hard. As a parent you want to take care of her," he said.
Ashlee was diagnosed with hyperinsulinism in Michigan months ago, but the treatment wasn't helping. So Dina and Dan went on the Internet - where they originally met - and did their own research. It led them to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the world's leaders in research, diagnosis and treatment of hyperinsulinism.
After two weeks at the hospital, doctors confirmed Ashlee had hyperammonemia, one of the rarest of the four types of hyperinsulinism. It's triggered by eating protein or prolonged fasting, Thornton said.
Thornton, who will visit Flint May 17 to speak to endocrinologists from around the state about diagnosis and treatment of hyperinsulinism, said Ashlee's type is so rare he couldn't estimate the number of cases diagnosed. He has seen only 10-15 cases at Children's Hospital in the last 10 years.
'Adapt and overcome'
But with the joy of having a complete diagnosis also came the disappointment that Ashlee was not a candidate for a pancreatectomy, in which a diseased part of the pancreas is removed, because her entire pancreas is diseased. Instead, doctors doubled the dose of the medicine Diazoxide, which blocks the secretion of insulin but also causes werewolf syndrome.
Ashlee, who has locks of curly, sandy blond hair, was bald nine months ago when she started on the medication. Now, excess hair - hardly noticeable because of its light color - grows along her jaw line, on her forehead, down her back and on her legs.
Doctors told the Tallises they can shave her, but with all she has to endure, including four daily blood-sugar finger pricks, her dad said that will be addressed when it gets to be an issue with her peers.
The important thing now is to find out how to best meet her nutrition needs. They are working with an endocrinologist at Hurley Medical Center and have an appointment later this month with a dietitian.
She is allowed some protein, but her daily allotment is nearly taken up with four bottles of milk.
"She's living on pasta and applesauce," Dan said.
But with all the downsides to the diagnosis, the Tallises are relieved to finally know the prognosis and treatment. Dina said they get their emotional strength from their "tough" little daughter.
The Tallises say they don't waste energy or emotions blaming themselves. Their mission now is to help other parents get a quick and accurate diagnosis so they don't waste precious time. They plan to start the campaign by printing informational pamphlets for clinics.
"We don't feel we're unlucky. She's a beautiful little girl with some problems," Dan said.
"Our family motto is 'adapt and overcome,' " he said, and stroked Ashlee's curly locks as she nodded off to sleep in her mother's arms.
old enough to set the table, old enough to pass the meat
But can it run Windows fast?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Probably this is just useful for transfers of very large amounts of data, and is the same as other storage devices except for its large size...
-Chris
I'm convinced that just about every function of the modern computer (save the ui and the cooling system) will be moved into silicon.
While it will be some time before solid state memory for the home PC becomes practical (and needed), this is but one stop on our journey to a slab computer.
Oh yeah? Well, I contain millions of copies of the human genome!! Of course - I can't run very fast...
pretty impressive considering i can't even access their site .....
What makes this even more impressive is that (as the article says) this is solid state storage. Not a magnetic system. Damm I want some!
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Library of congress is that...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Nobody who has to ask what a yacht costs has any business owning one." -J.P. Morgan
Why else do you think a company with expensive products like Cray's would avoid posting prices online?
If Teoma really wants to beat Google, maybe they should look at sinking all their cash into a cluster running these.
Where as Google's solution apparently has lower throughput than these drives do (they keep most of their web database in ram)
I'd post links but I can't find any :p
System Can Transfer 100 Copies of Human Genome Per Second and Quickly Handle Other Very Large, Data-Intensive Problems
SEATTLE (April 8, 2002) - Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced the availability of the world's highest-capability expansion memory and data transfer system. The new system, compatible with Cray SV1e and Cray SV1ex supercomputers, includes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per second-800 or more times faster than the 10- to 100-megabytes/second speeds typical with today's disk servers.
The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second. With their 32-gigabyte central memories and the new SSD system, Cray SV1 series supercomputers now provide up to a quarter terabyte of ultrafast memory. They can also be linked to a virtually unlimited number of standard disk servers for additional capacity, and to other computer systems via high-speed networking.
"With the new SSD system, Cray SV1 series supercomputers can handle extremely large, data-intensive problems with unprecedented speed, convenience and cost-effectiveness," said Jerry Loe, Cray vice president of worldwide sales and service. "This will be particularly useful in bioinformatics, and for complex automotive and aerospace applications." The Cray SV1 series, named "Best Supercomputer" in 2001 by the readers of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine, includes special hardware features for bioinformatics.
"With the new SSD, bioinformaticists will be able to work with several copies of the Human Genome at a time, or perform whole genome comparisons, or pursue drug design and discovery, without wasting valuable compute time waiting for standard disk data transfers," said Jef Dawson, Cray's manager of bioinformatics development and marketing. "The SSD can keep up with the Cray SV1 parallel supercomputers' processors, which perform up to 12 operations per clock cycle."
Dawson said the SSD will benefit virtually any application requiring large data sets. "The popular automotive application MSC/Nastran ran 2.5 times faster using the new SSD capability. Applications that run 'out of core,' including the popular GAUSSIAN chemistry codes, are also well suited to the SSD. You can think of the SSD as the world's biggest cache memory, or the world's biggest I/O buffer. Either way, it offers the world a new capability."
For more information on the Cray SV1ex series, visit www.cray.com or contact your local Cray sales representative.
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
how is that /. never get /.ed?
Shouldn't they have a larger storage capacity that 224GB then... like in the TB range? I mean, jeez with a 80GB transfer rate the disk will fill in 2.8 seconds!
Does anyone else wonder if this press release was strangly timed to coordinate nicley with last night's episode of Alias, where they were trying to swipe a cryogenically frozen solid state storage device that was kept 100 feet underground in a terrorist bunker?
Apple put a 'supercomputer' into a tiny little cube that anyone could buy. I'm not impressed.
Okay. so you can read all of the drive's memory in three seconds. (Not really, since you'll probably never get to the theoretical transfer speed).
Wouldn't it be more useful if it was 224 TB? If I was going to buy something like this for my PC (!) I would want total storage to be more than three times the bandwidth...
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
...and in a year, they'll have doubled the storage and/or speed.
Solid State is nothing new.
Storage capacity will keep getting larger.
Storage access speed will always get faster.
The day we'll be able to interface it straight into our brains... THAT will be something new.
Is this really news, besides to the greaseball technophiles who always have to have the latest and greatest the second it gets released?
~dlb
So, is the 80GB/s aggregate access for the (n) processors in the box? It's a Solid State Disk -- In other words, it's memory. And, it's not _that_ fast for a shared memory architecture system. see: STREAM Memory benchmarks
How much is it, and can I get it as birthday present?
"The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second."
... and I.. can transfer ...them ... uhhh... at about 10 million per second.
Not very impressive. My testicles hold about 10 million human genomes
Electronics is soooo far behind biology, it's laughable.
Looks like they'll need to optimize it for more traffic, even though they usually don't get much of it. The site is your face. Match its performance to your products, damn.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Just curious, I skimmed the press release and couldn't determine how they make it so much faster than existing RAM.
Is this something Intel could learn, or is it something that just requires tons more money?
*Concerned that this'll mainly be a big deal for super computers and not end users.*
"Derp de derp."
According to netcraft,
"The site www.cray.com is running Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0.9.6b on Solaris 8."
That has to be one crappy connection to divebomb solaris.
i bet they just use more parralel data buses, hard drives, whatever.
I can transmit my whole genome in a few seconds, While the silicone guys find ways of speeding this benchmark up, I'm looking for ways of slowing it down.
The CPU gets stuff from the cache.
The cache gets stuff from the RAM.
The RAM gets stuff from the hard drive.
The solid state machine won't act like faster memory, making cache misses cost less. It will act like a faster hard drive, making page faults cost less. Using this stuff as a substitute for RAM will slow down your computer unless you have it hard-wired into your system's bus in place of RAM.
They call it a "Solid State Disk (SSD)"? Sounds like a contradiction in terms to me. Usually "solid state" means "on chip(s)", and a disk is, well, round. Can anyone confirm/deny that there's a disk inside? Looks like the marketing department tried to justify its "usefulness" by changing a word along the way. The submitter calls it "storage" which looks more like the right term.
Or maybe they *do* have a spinning disk inside, and they write "solid state disk" to mean "non-liquid disk"...
Actually, if I recall the details correctly, this only exists because the SV1 is a 32-bit system.
"But it's a 64-bit processor!" I hear you exclaim. Yes, but PVP Crays (that includes EL, C90, J90, and SV1, but not T90 or T3D or T3E or SV2) have only (up to) 32 bits of physical memory address.
"But it supports 64 GB of memory, 32 bits is only 4 GB!" True, if you count in bytes! The Cray PVP line addresses memory in 8-byte words, so 2**32 words is 64 GB.
Thus, the engineers had a dilemma. They could fit 256 GB into the box (due to denser SDRAM parts), but the CPUs could only address 64 GB of it directly!
So they stuck a smart memory controller in the box, and did some OS hackery, and voila! the extra memory became available as a (very fast) disk instead. Additionally, the memory controller itself has a builtin memcpy engine, so if you're just copying data from "disk" to "ram" it doesn't touch the CPU at all, the CPU just tells the controller "hey, copy me 500 pages from address A to address B" and the controller does it.
I don't know offhand if the 80 GB/sec is the CPU-to-SSD bandwidth, or if it's the peak bandwidth of the copy engine...
- Their 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome
- The SSD can transfer data at 80 gigabytes per second, a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second.
#1 yields a Human Genome size of 8.3GB (224GB holds 27 genomes), but for #2 to be true, the genome would have to be 800MB (80GB/s == 100 genomes/s).Did they bork their numbers, or am I just misunderstanding?
Well, it doesn't beat my Playstation 2! It's 100 times for powerful than a super computer!
224GB isn't that much. The only thing that's amazing is the 80GB/s
ncludes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per
second
can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100
Human Genomes per second
Ok, so can it hold more data than it can transfer in a second, or can it transfer more data in a second than it can hold? Pick one, boys.
Ok, if we're going to measure capacity in terms of Human Genomes, I want to know how many Jelly Donut Units per hour it takes to power this thing.
"From the intensity of the flame we can deduce that this was a particularly delicious donut."
This one is serious music jukebox...
That's 80Gb/s of streaming porn!!!
All you need is the fat pipe to match.
I've looked all through the Cray website, and I can't find the online order form. How am I going to get one of these systems FedEx'd to me now?
(If you just count the ones that, you know, like, make it.)
This Fisting post dedicated to the fine editors at Slashdot. Keep up the good work!!!
for the announcement of something so impressive you'd think they'd have at least had someone proof-read the press release. it looks like my 8-year-old nephew approved the final copy.
The siliCONE guys might help to shave a couple seconds off your time. It's the siliCON guys who do the computer thing.
I don't know about Quake III, but I do know This Is The Ultimate storage solution for my ASCII Art colection.
Sweet Potato Pie
2 c Sweet potatoes, drained
4 T Margarine,melted
3 Eggs
1 c Sugar
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Grated nutmeg
3/4 c Milk
1 tsp Vanilla
1 9" pie shell, baked
1/4 c Chopped pecans
Use a food processor or fork to mash sweet potatoes together with melted margarine.Blend in eggs,sugar,cinnamon and nutmeg. Add milk and vanilla.Pour mixture into baked pie shell.Microwave on 70% (medium high) 7 minutes. Sprinkle pecans over surface of pie.Rotating midway through cooking,microwave on 70 % (medium high) 6 to 8 minutes or until center no longer jiggles. If you prefer, you can bake it in the oven at 375 degrees for about 35-45 minutes or until it doesn't jiggle.
Yield: 8 servings
There is no mention of Cracked Cocaine or Welfare checks; Two of the natives most important staples.
Come get it before it's cold.
Because that's who they're marketing it to - the bioinformatics crowd. Try to forget that there is little-to-no evidence that there's actually a market for all this genome-crunching that's going on.
Or that there are real questions about the quality of the sequencing that's been done, not to mention the (abysmal) quality of the code being written to analyze the sequences.
Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again...
-Mark
"includes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD)"
The author needs to look up what a solid state disk drive is. A solid state drive in simple terms is memory in the shape of a disk drive. So that's why it's as fast as memory. Now for fun get your calculator out and figure out what 224 GB of RAM cost.
Methinks were being jipped...
With virtual memory hardware, you can write an operating system that simulates non-volatile main memory, using hard disk as a backing store. What you get is a Persistent Operating System. You don't need a file system. Instead, you store data structures in main memory, and they persist forever, surviving reboots.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Each base pair only needs 2 bits to represent it (there are only 4 bases). Based on the genome-munging code I've seen, though, it's very common to represent genome sequences with one byte per base pair, like so:
"CGAAGAACGAT"
A little comp. sci. 101 would be a good investment for some of these people, I think.
-Mark
Only projects that easily comes to my mind for using such a technology is CERN's LHC project. Though it seem that this one is still inadequate for their purposes. Promising development in any case. Some numerical information on LHC computational challence.
Actually, you're only transmitting half your genome....
Interesting enough, even if Cray's webserver uses these fast disks, their uplink probablly can't do 80GBps transfer....well unless they have some crazy darkfibers that no one uses.... :-)
... that would mean it would only take less roughly 3 seconds to fill up this drive.... wow.... :-)
Would be cool though, to have 80GBps uplinks to download all the cool media you want.... whew! Let see....224/80
"System Can Transfer 100 Copies of Human Genome Per Second"
Big deal, I can transfer O( 1e6 ) half-copies of the human genome in less than five minutes.
The announcement was pretty thin on technical details. What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters? That title implies not, to me. Exactly what technology allows 224G of storage in non-platter form? Is this an actual commercial implementation of the crystal holography gunk and other amazing "future" stuff?
It sure would be interesting to know if this is a real advance, or just a big disk.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It seems to me that many people here have no idea what a true supercomputer (or more specifically, a Cray) is or what makes it different from a simple cluster. Here's a few things to think about:
- Crays do not have monitors. They do not have keyboards, or mice.
- Crays do not run Windows. Crays do not run Linux. Crays usually run UNICOS, a special *nix designed specifically for Crays.
- Crays communicate with the outside world through a host terminal, like a SGI workstation, or something similar to that. Crays DON'T HAVE CD-ROM DRIVES!
- Nobody but those with 8-9 figure incomes get to buy a Cray. They cost MILLIONS, and the higher end ones can cost many many tens of millions.
- Pretty much the type of people that WOULD buy a Cray would be the government, and very very large corporations. Sorry, guys.
- Simply connecting 30 PCs together in a cluster will result in a nice, fast supercluster, but it won't come close to a Cray, because Crays are designed from the beginning to be as parallel as possible. Face it: beowulf clusters really can't make the best use of the contained hardware because the hardware wasn't designed to be so distributed.
- Be impressed with Crays. Be very impressed.
-James
I've got the pr0n, no doubt about that. But how in the world am I going to get (or even pay for) a connection that will support 80GB/s downloads now that I have the storage....
fear my zig!
(to diverge ever so slightly)
"Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again..."
I think not.
There is quite a market for bioinformatics. My employer spends around 5 billion USD a year on pharma R+D. Much of that money is used in traditional "brute-force" type attacks of screening many compounds against many targets.
There is tremendous potential for savings through bioinformatics, and the evidence is working its way through pharma pipelines as we speak.
While there may be as much hype around bioinformatics, the field is solving a genuine problem for a mature, well-funded industry, unlike the dot-com book which speclated on products many didn't want with money that didn't exist.
I'm sorry, but this baby is not good enough!
80 GB/s and only 224GB total storage= 224/80=2.8 sec to fill the whole disk. I.e worthless! What am I going to do after the first 2.8 seconds of usage????
Stupid Cray! LOL!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
"With their 32-gigabyte central memories..."
Of course they need a 224 GB "solid state device" ! Every worthwile competitor of theirs can just put 256GB of main memory in their big box.
It looks to me that Cray can't easily address more than 32GB on their box, so they just use "extended memory" as a disk.
Buy an IBM / HP / Sun top of the line, stack
it with 256GB, and you can use 224GB as a file buffer. Or 128GB, or 16 GB, or whatever you do not use for something more important.
You've been fooled by PR spin on a limitation :-)
Like windows and 36bit addressing on Xeons...
First off, it's nice to see Cray coming back into the spotlight again. But on to my main subject: Imagine if they hooked a couple of these Cray storage racks up to the ASCI White system at Los Alamos and did some calculations. I wonder how many teraflops that would give it - I mean, 80 gigs a second is probably more memory bandwidth than 1 board of ASCI White could handle. Who knows, 50, 60 teraflops could easily be within reach. Problem arises though, how much cable would you need to provide the necessary bandwidth to the system?!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
But I'm picking up to after work!
/dies
I'm not sure what happened, but my coworker just screamed "the price" and died in his cubicle?
if Cray wants to cement it's position in computing well into the future, they should transfer this technology to high-end PC's. There would be a huge market for it at the right price...
the link where it says that the rice genome has more information in it than the human one?
I'm serious - this is the rather evocative name of a unit of capacity equivalent to that of Sydney Harbour - can't remember whether it's at high or low tide... :-)
We had this discussion on slashdot back in the day and it seems to be a trend. The fact is that with all the progress made in computing technology, those spinning platters and movable arms have been the bottleneck for some time.
--Jon
Six months ago, sun announced starcat which can take 576GB of main memory. Sun also claims 172.8GByte/sec bandwidth across the interconnect.
"100 Human Genomes per second" or 100 hg/s. Someone needs to submit "hg/s" to the ISO people as a proposal for a high speed data transfer unit. Of course, they'll have to decide whose genome to use as a benchmark, and then micro-engrave it on platinum plates, but hey they love that kind of thing.
Follow the link, and you'll see some even more impressive benchmarks:
Install cost: $200T
this is equivalent to 150 United Kingdom GDP's!
Maintainance cost: $40B/ms
or on average $40T per second of cash straight into Cray's pocket!
This is equivalent to the amount of money 240 Bill Gates' lose when he stops to pick his nose!
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
A few racks of 1U servers could be configured to have that much DRAM.
Bastian: I don't knooooowwWWWWWW, AAAHHhhhhhh! Bastian is trown from the clif by an an invisible hand.
Those struck by lightening and survive fear tingling sensations.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So can we expect them to design a new type of system that has non-volatile memory and vast storage in a similar array, divvied up on the fly by the system depending on whether it needs storage or memory at the moment? I've been waiting for the day when memory and hard drive became one, and this seems to take that one step closer to the inevitable.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
If I just wanted a website that spit up corporate press releases, I would go to Yahoo finance. There are a lot of interesting stories we could have about Cray, but this isn't one of them.
What the heck kind of bus do the expect to drop this wad of data onto? Or are they planning to just map it directly into some memory array? Something like this could change a lot of software - having offline storage faster than main memory is a big deal for many algorithms. The implications are huge! When can I get one and how many lotteries do I need to win?
I'm not much of a hardware buff, but wouldn't this take the movie industry by storm. Unlimited detail (80Gb/s worth of detail)could be put forth into the models and cut rendering time. I'm not sure, any help here?
your average scsi3x raid0 array.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
....do we really NEED to go this fast? "Won't someone PLEEASE think of the children?!"
>>transfer an unprecedented 80GB(!!) every second.
my consumption of pr0n cant even go up to that high rate!!!
my blog
which sort of precludes MEMS...
It's only a fraction of the RAM size of an average supercomputer. No wonder Cray isn't at the top of supercomputing anymore, it's basically a reseller nowadays.
that's pretty impressive. you want to know something equally as interesting, but far less of a "good thing" ...i' mgood friends with the guy that killed Semour Cray. when i found out it was my friend that killed him, i was going to kikc his ass... but he's a kempo teacher, so i didn't.
About 10 years ago I read about a solid state device called a "holostore" that was in the prototype stage. It consisted of crystalline cylinders about a millimeter or so in diameter and 5 or 10 mm long, standing next to each other in a 50x50 array. Data was stored and read optically by three laser beams aimed at different angles polarizing the molecules, same principle as an LCD. I forget the total capacity but the transfer rate figure of 8 or 80Gb/second seems familiar. The prototype was said to have the same form factor as a 5-1/4-inch floppy drive, and like everything else it was supposed to be on the market in 2 or 3 years.
In order for a transfer rate of 80 GB/sec to be useful doesn't RAM have to be capable of a higher transfer rate? Wouldn't you just get a huge bottleneck? Or is there some technology or use that this drive is put to that makes this irrelevant? If not, do Cray's computers have ram that is faster than 80GB/sec?
Very impressive though.
first post.
A Beowulf cluster implies commodity hardware (otherwise, it's a cluster-o'-workstations or a supercomputer). I don't think that this new technology comes anywhere close to your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart shelf.
-Josh O-
Another variant of Moore's law (of who I forget stated it) says that a balanced supercomputer is "bytes == flops", that is it must be able to process as many bytes of data PER SECOND as it can do floating point operations. This has often meant that core memory must be about the same number of bytes as there are flops. This device goes a long way in satisfying this requirement.
Early super computers in a generation sometimes skimp on such memory and are only good for problems that dont require much I/O like some physics simulations. Anything that processes data such as satellite imagery or seismic, weather, etc. requires significant memory capacity..
*sob might as well get high*
I'll never be able to afford some kewl tech like that..
Anyways, we're jamming !
This is impressive. With tranfers of 80 GB/S that is smokin'! when can i get me one of these for home? does anyone know the cost per byte on one of these bad boys??? Solid State is whoopass...all the flexibility and speed of DRAM with none of the data loss if you wind up with a poer outage..... Must HAVE!!!! *drool*
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
Can I get one for my home PC and will it cost less than the GNP of a small third-world country?
(Just wondering)
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
If data security is important, then RAM is the way to go, because it is very easy to decisively destroy data that you don't want to be read. For that reason, there is a very big hubub about growing RAM storage sizes.
Finally! Hardware good enough for my pR0n collection and distribute it at a fast rate.
how much does a pack of gum cost?
you know you're thinking it too.
It's sad. but true.
Bet the porn industry will find a use for the storage system
Compressed genomes? Lossless I hope. I'd hate to see the compression "artifacts"...
I'm no expert, but wouldn't it need a fat wedge of CPU cycles to [de]compress that data?
That said, my 386SX 16Mhz (R.I.P) had a compressed disk, but even that was only about 2x the actual space, max.
Theres no doubt about who they're marketing this to though. And these companies are filing patents on every genome they find, often without even knowing what they do! Not that it makes any difference whether they know or not, I DON'T WANT A PATENT ON MY /dev/body/*!! Thankyouverymuch.
Ali
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
Uh, NEAT. Sure I'll trade-in my home PC for a CRAY SUPERCOMPUTER.....and gimmie one of them SPACE SHUTTLES too! Get real people...