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Red Storm Rising: Cray Wins Sandia Contract
anzha writes "It seems Cray is alive and kicking at least. They might even be making a come back after its very rough time as a part of SGI. The big news? Cray seems to have won the Red Storm contract - Sandia's newest supercomputer procurement - from Sandia National Labs. Check out the press release here. I'd say that this is probably an SV2, but the press release is a bit scant on details."
link on story should be http://www.cray.com not ww
Wasn't Red Storm a project put forth by Compaq to build a 100 teraflop system?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Being a long time Cray fan and standing in awe of how massive are the undertakings currently being driven by supercomputer, I would normally be impressed. But I just finished reading Seth Lloyd's article at the Edge. The MIT professor of Mechanical Engineering came up with "The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops". I know /. dealt with this recently but reading the prof's thought processes in depth is a fun intellectual high.
O yah I gotta get me a Beowulf cluster 'o these, baby.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Don't know about Sigmund Cray, But SEYMOUR Cray might be proud.
Crays run a variant of Unix called UNICOS
;)
too lazy to dig you up a link, and no need to karma whore anyways, just google it or go to cray.com and read about it
Distributed processing is only really good when the subproblems are separate enough that they can be calculated separately.
Also, supercomputers are a lot better for vector code. Intel and Athlon might say that their current offerings are Vector Processors, but they really aren't. When you need to exploit DLP, supercomputers are the way to go.
Also, research and funding like this will uncover the techniques that we can expect to be exploited in desktop processors in 5-20 years, so it helps us eventually.
A cluster isn't an MPP.
The Cray SV2 is an MPP. It is composed of both SSMP and Vector
technologies and is basically a "next generation" T3E. Where the
original T3E was an SSI MPP using the Alpha
microprocessor, it was SSMP only.
As to why anyone would buy a large system such as an SV2, beyond the
performance, there is an aspect to manageability, patching and
testing that really large clusters have a problem with. This in
combination with the fact that you have to have huge computer rooms
with power and cooling, where certain agencies are spending up to
~100 Million on the physical facilities alone. Then once you have
your large physical plant and giant cluster, there is a little issue
of latency. The speed of light is constant, if I have to fetch data
a few million times from the other end of the room it adds up. All
of this added together makes spending, say 30 million, on an SV2 look
like a real bargain.
It has little to do with the O.S. and more to do with the fundamental
tools, read architectures, to do the job. Face it, commercial off the
shelf technology and huge clusters aren't *great* for every problem,
just like it would be wasteful for most home users to have 8 way SMP's
in to run Quake, or a word processor on.