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?

[bentini]

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.

More Info and doh!

[anzha]

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.

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. ;) BTW, sorry, I can't believe I missed the w. Is Bush holding it hostage in his name? ;)