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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."
Ok, I'm only halfway through the video about SV2 architecture at http://www.cray.com/company/video/ and I already find my question laughable :D
This stuff is plain cool.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
from: Building a Better Bio-Supercomputer, this one year old newspiece might provide some info on what the system will be:
<clip> Competitor Compaq is taking a different path. In January, the company announced plans to develop a 100-teraflop bio-supercomputer dubbed Red Storm in partnership with Celera Genomics, the Rockville, Md., company that mapped the human genome, and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Although Blue Gene will be 10 times faster than Red Storm, a Celera executive stresses that the company's machine could eventually match IBM's speed. Unlike Blue Gene, though, Red Storm is being designed for a broader array of life-science experiments and may be used to conduct nuclear research. The supercomputer, set to begin operating in 2004, will cost an estimated $125 million to $150 million to build. </clip>
This seems to be somewhat in-line with the cost approximate stated in the press release $90 million. Or am I completely in my effort to undestand what this press release is about?
The answer to the question is no.. Cray doesn't use ECL for the main beasts any more. That was one of the things that drove them into the ground in the 90's. The Japanese switched to CMOS, and drove the prices way down. Cray eventually followed suit, with their former low-end (YMP-EL which was CMOS based from the get go) spawning the SV1.
Since I submitted this story, Sandia National Labs has released their own press release here. Note that they say, it's an MPP (Massively Parallel Processor), but details to come.
;)
BTW, sorry, I can't believe I missed the w. Is Bush holding it hostage in his name? ;)
What's interesing is that Cray has two machines that might be called MPPs:
1. The T3E with it's single system image, Unicos/mk and Alpha processors.
2. The Linux Cluster.
The SV2 might be called a massively parallel vector machine with potentially thousands of vector processors; However, they likely would have said 'vector' in the initial press release. On top of that, Cray would have trumpeted probably quite loudly they'd sold $90 million worth of SV2 because it helps more systems.. That makes me have doubts whether or not its an SV2.
The MTA doesn't count here either being called a multithreaded architecture rather than a parallel one (semantic hair splitting, yes, but important ones).
Furthermore, Cray is in the process of discontinuing the T3E because of its age.
To make it even more delicious is that Red Storm is mentioned a lot in searches at Sandia in conjunction with Cplant. Cplant uses linux...
So with a little bit of thought that would imply which Cray would be used here?
Saying 'imagine a beowulf cluster of those' might be a bit more accurate than the joke would normally go.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I'm not sure what this new Red Storm machine has in the way of individual nodes, but Sandia has some history in parallel computing, dating back to the paper
as well as the ASCI Red machine, which, IIRC, was the first machine to break the 1 teraFLOPS barrier.That machine, BTW, was built by Intel out of fastest Pentium chips of the day. I think a later upgrade to Pentium IIs increased its speed to about 3 teraFLOPS.
As far as MP machines are concerned, it could be argued on the basis of the ASCI Red machine that they have a fairly "economical" strategy [I know, I know, it's hard to argue that anything costing $9e7 as being "economical" - but you are talking about buying one of the fastest few computers in the world - rack mounted Athlon MPs could do great until you get up to O(100) processors, but doing the interconnects for O(10000) processors gets to be tricky].
Also there is CPlant, their own (everybody's gotta have one) pet project to build a B----- cluster out of Alpha based machines running a modified Linux.
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