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Cray SX-6 Installed in Alaska
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."
Before anyone trolls about putting it in Alaska to save on air conditioning, Fairbanks gets into the 80F in the summer. Just thought I'd clear that up.
Maskirovka
Is a counter troll still a troll?
I thought cray was dead, but it turns out, they were just using BSD.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Just in case you want to play with toys like these, the ARSC is looking for an admin.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Cray SX-6 Installed at ARSC
Fairbanks, Alaska - The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) and Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) announced today an agreement that places a Cray SX-6 at ARSC. ARSC is pleased to be able to offer this leading technology to the wi
Oh wait a minute, it's a f*cking supercomputer! Sorry about that.
What I am waiting for is the Cray SV2 which can have up to 1024 Cray vector processors. Who needs a beowulf cluster?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Cray advertisement for the SX-6
Cray product sheet on the SX-6 (PDF).
A system that can pump out 64 gflops only running at a measly 500Mhz? Really shows how poorly mhz is as a measure of system performance.
It shall be used to create, download, store, and compile the WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL PORN.
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
> I suppose Alaska could be the paradise for heavy
> metal and overclocking...
For only about 9 months of the year, probably a shift less. Fairbanks is deep in the interior of the state and is known for pushing 100 degrees farenheit in the summer (and then dropping to 30 below in the depths of January).
I think Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
Even less extreme parts of the state get to the point where you'd have to install air conditioning to get you through notable chunks of the year.
Details are here
And yes, you get to play with the new Cray.
For more information, please contact:
Thanks! We're looking for someone with experience with supercomputers.
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.
It's NOT a measure of system performance.
It's a measure of clock speed.
It's like saying "This engine tops out at 2000rpm, but this engine here can do 4000rpm"
Is the second a more powerful engine? Hardly.. the first is out of a huge diesel caterpillar; the second is out of 20 year old Honda Civic.
Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
I wouldn't doubt it.
I used to live there some time back. The depths of winter would see super lows around -60F sometimes in town where the ice fog and carbon monoxide from running vehicles would pile up. (You'd be afraid to turn off your car, too, at those temperatures unless you were near an outlet you could plug your engine block heater and battery warmer into.) Fortunately, on the Fbx campus there are lots of parking spaces with such plugs.
Also, up on the hill where the UAF campus is located, the temperatures in the dead of winter are usually warmer than downtown Fbx, or places southeast of the city (Badger Road).
I could tolerate the cold with minor inconvenience. You can even wear tennis shoes outside quite nicely for up to about 15 minutes at at time - about the time to go between buildings in the worse case. The more insidious drawback to Fbx in the winter is the paucity of daylight.
Summertime high temperatures are usually in the 80s in early July; August is the rainy season. I once saw it go into the low 90's, but that's as unusual as going below -60F in the winter.
Oh, and definitely watch out for the mosquitoes. In the height of the season, the arctic is infested with as many of the little bloodsuckers as the everglades.
Not to be all down on Fairbanks - there's a lot of wonderful scenery (Alaska range to the south, including Denali(/McKinley). Great rivers, fishing, hunting, backpacking, etc. Frequently you can see the aurora borealis in the winter.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
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.