Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Red Storm Rising: Cray Wins Sandia Contract

Posted by Hemos on from the storming-back dept.

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."

4 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. err.. I'm confused? by Drunken+Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wasn't Red Storm a project put forth by Compaq to build a 100 teraflop system?

    --
    Have you been stalked by Seth today?
  2. SuperComputer Dawrfed by Laptop by Quirk · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
  3. generally by martissimo · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ;)

  4. Re:Care to shed some light? by bentini · · Score: 5, Informative
    A lot of problems just don't scale well across different systems. Say, fo rinstance, you need to simulate particle interaction...

    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.