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Cray SX-6 Installed in Alaska

Posted by timothy on from the good-air-conditioning dept.

Dhrakar writes: "Now, I know that normally press releases are imediately round-filed, however, as this is the first NEC^H^H^HCray SX-6 to be installed in the U.S. it is newsworthy. The 8cpu, 64Gb system has been installed at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for benchmarking and other testing. See either ARSC or the NY Times (sub. required. Yada, yada) article."

7 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. pricing by martissimo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    hmm for all the people who wanna figure out what it would cost to run one of theese babies.

    This link states in it that:

    The "SX-6 Series" will be shipped from the end of December 2001 with the monthly rental price starting from 2,800,000 Yen.

    By my calculations thats actually only about 22 thousand a month in dollars... not like im gonna be grabbin one, but frankly i would of thought they charge more

  2. Re:ping cray by Verizon+Guy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, Crays run Unicos, which is System V based and not BSD based.

    --

    Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski

  3. Re: Japanese scare (Vector Processors) by octogen · · Score: 2, Interesting
    These SX-* Systems are Vector Processor Machines. You need special programming techniques and compilers to make use of their peak processing power.

    If you have to run applications, where you can not make much use of vectorized instructions, then these systems are not faster than any other computer is, too.

    There are two american companies which are developing very impressive technologies:

    • Starbridge systems tries to make processors much more efficient, thus providing more processing power on less space. They make use of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), a lot of simple and stupid chips which can be reconfigured a couple of thousand times to run a combination of instructions most efficiently.

    • IBM is developing as much as three interesting technologies simultaneously:
      - IBM tries to build hypercomputers (quantum computers), and research results look pretty promising. - a few images
      - They are going to build a One-Petaflop Supercomputer until 2005 utilizing 1,048,576 Processors (32 Cores per Chip, 64 CPUs per Board, 8 Boards per Frame, in 64 Frames) - Blue Gene Project
      - They are developing CPU Cores, where all execution units are connected asynchronously - that makes it easy to reach an extremly high clock frequency.


    Speed per processor doesn't matter - just think about Intel SMP systems compared to RISC SMPs. Scalability is the one thing that matters in supercomputer technology.
  4. Re:Japanese scare by Durinia · · Score: 3, Interesting
    They *are* on the mass market now. Cray made an agreement with NEC to resell them in the US. In return, they dropped the dumping lawsuit stuff that was keeping them out.

    I agree that Americans need a more heterogeneous set of supercomputers these days. Vector computing has "gone out of style", but it's still very very useful for a lot of applications. We may see vectors return somewhat with this reselling plan, and with the soon-to-be-released Cray SV2.

  5. Re:Unimpressive performance??? by Lictor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    People *seriously* underestimate just how pathetic the memory bandwidth is on your standard desktop PC.

    For the coders among you: Suppose you had an algebraic structure datatype that you had test against a set of n! permutations. Standard programming dogma says: Generate the permutations once, store them in memory, and then grab them as needed... right?

    At least on my Athlon XP (and, I suspect, any modern processor with a piece of crap bus)... WRONG. It ends up being MUCH faster to regenerate the permutations from scratch every freaking time you need them, rather than risk having a cache miss and grabbing them from RAM.

    I know you won't believe me, because I didn't believe me at first either. I couldn't imagine that the memory bandwidth was THAT BAD. I coded it up this way to see how much WORSE it performed... and it ended up performing better. An important lesson about optimizing programs for modern Intel/AMD architectures was learned: often times is faster to recompute on the 2GHz processor, rather than wait for the not_2GHz_bus to fetch information from RAM.

    But please, don't take my word for it, go try it for yourself.

  6. Re:This is totally unremarkable. by Lictor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because....

    The memory bandwidth of E10k's is a rounding error compared to an SX-6...

    and... SPARCS aren't vector processors.

    But since you think CPUs + RAM == net performance of a computer, I can safely assume you probably haven't the foggiest idea what a vector processor is, or how one could take advantage of it.

    And its not a Cray anymore than the Dodge Stealth was truely a Dodge... the SX-6 is made by NEC and re-badged as a Cray for sale in NA.

  7. Re:They're looking for a SysAdmin by icehawk55 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I took a job here at the ARSC. It's one of the best places I have ever worked. The temperature swing is something too get used to. (-66 to +99 are the records for Fairbanks). Imagine working in one of the highest tech sites in the country with NO traffic. You get to know all your neighbors. And you get the Aurora's. It is awesome. If a person were to get a chance to work with the people at the ARSC they should jump at the chance. It's been a kick.