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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."
Wasn't Red Storm a project put forth by Compaq to build a 100 teraflop system?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
I know something about the problems of multiprocessing, but I would like to know how come monumental systems can still sell in the days of commodity hardware and - oh gosh, not again - Beowulf
Just pondering while waiting for net-enabled market of processing power (remember processtree?) and storage space (freenet, the new one) to make millionaires of all excessive-hardware owners, through paypal. Well, maybe not
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
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
Does it run Linux ? If so, how much time would it take to compile the kernel.
My mom never taught me to sign.
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
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?
Yeah, I believe Cray is gonna sell a lot more High-end systems this year... with Final Fantasy XI being released and all.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
i thought the same too. Even if it was a movia adaption, i wouldnt get excited. Tom Clancy movies have a BAD habbit of being utterly massacred and turned into crappola compared to the books (The one exception being the Hunt for Red October, which i felt to be pretty decent). Now i know its hard to impossible to make a movie that follows a book perfectly. But after the foul taste of "clear and present danger", which was so far different from the book as to barely deserve the same title as the book, I dont have much hope for future clancy movies. I havent seen sum of all fears yet, I am gonna wait for it to hit rental status first.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
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.
SGI at least tempts us with stuff that will fit on a desk, Cray needs to too cause i want one god damn it!
I want 2D games back.
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?
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.
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.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Speaking of, when is someone going to start making machines that look as good as those old Thinking Machines CM installations?
God those were sexy. I'd take one to bed with me now.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Distributed processing is only really good when the subproblems are separate enough that they can be calculated separately.
Um...that's not really true. Certainly, distributed processing works like gangbusters when the problem is what's called "embarrassingly parallel". Things like Seti, or distributed ray tracing of a static scene scale perfectly on a distributed system.
But there are lots of groups (the DOE national labs being some) that do distributed work on problems that are not embarrassingly parallel. The trick is making sure that you have a fast interconnect between the boxes, and can make use of that interconnect efficiently.
In general, a simulation (including particle simulations) will break up a region of space into pieces, and each piece is calculated for a "time step" on a processor. Then they each determine if they need information from another processor, or if their information could be used by another. A collective communication then takes place to exchange what's needed. Rinse and repeat.
If you do your work right, you get a scalable system, one where you can add processors and get a proportional increase in performance (or maximum problem size). If you don't do you work right, the system will not scale well.
Distributed computing is being used for more and more things these days.