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."

Comments

Re:Care to shed some light?

[UranusReallyHertz]

It all comes doen to inter-cpu bandwidth needs for the particular piece of code you need to run. A render farm has pretty much no need for interprocessor bandwidth, wheras crays have it in the 100's of GBs/s because the kind of numerical physics simulation that is usually run on these beasties needs all the bandwidth it can get, and a little beowulf cluster of x86 toys just ain't gonna gut it.

supercomputer "corporate welfare"

[peter303]

Generally the only way large supercomputers can be built in the USA is through government contracts. Industry is unwilling to pay more than $10 million for a large computer. The Department of Energy has been commisioning top-end computers ($10M to $100M) for weapons research and NOAA for weather forecasting.

I am ambivalant about this. On one hand I want to see a petaflop computer by 2010. (Two 100 teraflop computers have contracted for the 2007 timeframe, so this is possible.) On the other hand I am suspicious that computer companies won't build these on their own and dont like the governement propping up weak computer companies.

Re:Huh?

[fgodfrey]

I realize that this is a troll, but I'll reply anyway. The technologies that are invented for super-computing class systems have a way of making their way over time into a machine that you *will* put under your desk. Both MMX and more Altivec (a beefier version of MMX that is in certain PowerPC processors including the ones in I think all current Macs) are based on vector processing technology and ideas originally designed by Seymore Cray in the 70's for the Cray I. So the answer is, everyone cares, even if nobody knows exactly why. I won't pretend that I know exactly what technology from current Crays will end up in desktop systems in 10 years, but *something* probably will. The same can be said for the technology that is in current SGI and IBM (etc) supercomputers.

For another example, clustering technology (which I'm sure is going to get posted about in this thread) was an attempt to duplicate and borrows ideas from the massively parallel machines like the Cray T3E, the SGI Origin, and the old Thinking Machines boxes.