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Time For A Cray Comeback?
Boone^ writes "The New York Times has an article (free reg. req.) talking about Cray Inc.'s recent resurgence in the realm of supercomputing. It discusses a bit of Cray's decline when the Cold War ended, "the occupation" under SGI, and the rebirth of the company after the Tera (now Cray Inc.) purchase. Recently Cray Inc. has been shipping their vector-based Cray X1 machine, designing ASCI Red Storm, and recently was one of 3 (also Sun, IBM) to win a large DARPA contract (PDF link) to design and develop a PetaFlops machine by 2010. Could Cray Inc. be poised for a comeback? Wall Street seems to think so."
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Posting as Anonymous Coward, please award my Karma to starving children in the world.
Naturally. We have another Bush in the Whitehouse, and I even hear the Wang Chung is making a comeback -- so why not Cray?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
SCO vs. Cray
Many scientists are very concern about state of supercomputing in US. Hopefully new generation of supercomputers improve this situation.
Can somebody explain what the benefit of a supercomputer is compared to a big cluster of off-the-shelf components?
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Of course I expect that...in my Playstation IV,
equipped with an opto-quantic Emotion Engine VI
and a couple petabytes of holographic storage.
-><- no
There are still MANY applications for supercomputers. A lot of people think that linux/beo-clusters are going to be replacing supercomputers of the Cray/NEC/IBM variant. Not true. There are still many research, scientific, and military applications that require machines developed not for "slow" distributed number crunching, but require ultra high speed processor and memory architechtures.
So definately, time for Cray to come back and retake the supercomputer industry crown.
Perl, proprietary?
Uhh...
LNUX Vs CRAY
What's your point?
There's a whole bunch of PETAFlops outside of McDonalds right now having a sit in and screaming about how fur is murder.
I had to literally step on their faces to get a Big Mac.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you look at the list of top 100 supercomputers, there are systems that are almost 15 years old or even older (not sure on a few). I know these take years to build and are multibillion dollar projects, but between time has got to be a killer.
Then there's the question of ... what do you need a supercomputer for? The applications are pretty limited for a need for a petaflop computer, unless your doing mass storage, cryptography (cracking), or simulations.
Don't get me wrong I'm all about nuclear testing being done in 1's and 0's instead of in the ocean or in the desert, but how big of a bomb do you really need when it's estimated theres enough nukes to blast the entire land surface of the earth 3 times over.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
what about a beowolf cluster of THESE!!!
sorry, i didn't see it and it was screaming to be done. actually now that i think about it, isn't the term beowulf cluster limited to smaller machines anyway? wouldn't a huge multiproc machine be in some sense a cluster in and of itself? i dunno. need more coffee.
-PsychoI3oy
mmm freeBSDelicious.
No LSI, HIT, DDN, IBM, etc storage sales - How will they store what they process?
Cray died. Anything else is just bartering on his name.
Are they gonna code BCD (binary coded decimal) in their "supercomputers"? I wouldn't call any computer that does anything for the sake of decimal "super", including conversions. Stop acknowledging decimal!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Saw this earlier today. My first thought was how cool it was to see the old cray logo again. More than that, 'tho, I can see some real possibilities here. Since home computers are increasingly looking like supercomputers of yore, it will be interesting to see if any of this technology trickles down to the home market. I want a CRAY AMD box.
Didn't Sun basically buy out or hire away a bunch of Cray, Inc.? I always heard the E10000 was actually a Cray product. Oh, and just to brag, I have a blue jacket with a picture of a Y-MP-90 on the back with the words, "CRAY - WORLD'S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTERS". Too cool for words. Ebay rules.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
SCO vs Nike
Look at me, I'm a stock analyst!
I was just on their site looking at the machines. Weird, weird, weird.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Not Found
:)
The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.26 Server at www.tera.com Port 80
---
Looks like they need to host their website on a SUPERcomputer to handle a Slashdotting! (Noooooobody expects a Slashdotting!
The home page at Cray for the Cascade project.
There are some interesting PDFs there. Chew, mull, and consider.
Also consider what Horst Simon, head of NERSC said here too.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
It is controlled by the desparate-attempt-at-sarcasm CSS style.
Maybe now that there's once again a major player in the computer market with machine casing designs even SILLIER than Apple's, the rest of the Geek Community will give us a little slack..
But I still want an old one in my basement for a couch.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Java Web App
Seriously: my anecdotal experience while surfing the web is that flaky sites are java-based 9 times out of 10.
somebody.. please stop this new simoniker before it's too late, i have some work to do, really :)
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
How does DARPA know that the money granted unto these respective companies will be used for their intended purposes? Surely some method exists to make sure the money (our tax dollars really) doesn't wind up being another form of government subsidy? (a.k.a: corporate welfare?)
-Pizaz
Was the reason they went away, can't see things have changed when, especially when you can now cluster much cheaper alternatives
Why do people buy those really expensive supercomputers, when they could just buy an Apple one instead? They're much cheaper!
Linux vs Microsoft
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables. Take weather simulation. If having too many variables stretches todays forcast into next week, then it's useless. So you limit the amount of variables to come up with a "close enough" forcast in a more timely manner. With a faster computer, you can get a more accurate simulation in a more reasonable time period. This increase in accuracy/complexity is then useful in many fields.
What is a supercomputer? Look here for an explination. What can we use them for? Curing evil diseases.
:)
These are available here. This might give you ideas as to what kind of staff works on one of these machines.
I'd also like to point out that Cray has been vigorously searching for qualified individuals. I wouldn't know this officially; I check their site out every month or so. Positions get filled quickly!
Oh hell, just read their site. It has enough information about what they do
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
You knew this was coming, didn't you?
CRAY vs. MSFT
...isn't 'Cray' today about as 'Cray' as the company that now owns 'Atari'? What's left besides the name of the original company?
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Power *usage* perhaps......
Looks like somebody forgot to click the "Post Anonymous" checkbox.
The name Cray is synonymous with speed and high end performance. Of course many clued up folks are building their own solutions with the power of clustering.
OK this is about as much a kiddy thing as how many VWs fit inside a football stadium or something, but... ...anyone know of a site with info on how current and past supercomputers compare to current desktops? Where are we at now with 2GHz G5s and 3.3GHz P4s, relatively?
One of the comparisons made when I was at university was of a 30-something MHz 386, with a supercomputer from 1973, showing how they do about the same amount of processing/data transfer but in completely different ways. I found that fascinating
The oldest Supercomputer in the top100 is the good old asci blue mountain.
Its at place 30. 5 years old now.
Asci red (before the p2overdrive upgreade) would still be place 36. 6 Years old.
And those 2 are only present because they were the fastest of their kind.
For the record: The fastest machine 10 years( the cm5 from thinking machines) has only 20% of the performance of the LAST entry of the current top500.
15 years ago there was no top500 list, but at that time a cray ymp or hitachi s820 were the best of the best. Performance compareabloe to a dual p4xeon or dual opteron workstation.
btw: simulations arent some crazy thing only nuke-builders do.
Some kickass machines of the top500 are doing useful simulation work for companies like basf, gm, bayer, ect.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Probably not. Cray made some money back when a supercomputer was something that an ordinary company might need. The capabilities of "normal" computers was much more limited then today, so there was a much higher percentage of the buying public likely to want something more. These days the vast majority of users are happy with something mainstream
But, you ask, isn't there a lunatic fringe who wants more power at any price? Well, the lunatic fringe ain't what it used to be. During the heyday of cray you got a damn fine box and nothing else. Cray didn't want to worry about your software--or even an OS. A person who needed the speed would plunk down the money for the box and then pay a couple of guys to code everything from scratch. Those days are gone--software is the driving factor these days, and people are far less willing to buy something that's going to force a total code rewrite. Especially if that thing is only going to buy them a couple of years of edge before they need to recode for the next best thing.
Then there's the question of whether cray can afford to be bigger. The answer is "probably not". If you sell to a lot of customers you need a huge support infrastructure. Cray doesn't have much of one anymore, so they'd need to buy one. (Most of the old support guys left one way or another when SGI came in, or stayed with SGI.) If you have a lot of customers you can spread the costs around, but in the case of a company like cray a support infrastructure means having a people sitting around most of the time in every region you sell a machine. Maybe two to four guys per system (24x7, right?) plus some sorta warehouse facility if you enter a new geographical market. That's expensive. You can bill a lot of that cost back to the customers, but that just makes your systems less competetive.
I think the long term answer is that cray will be a very small niche player, selling to a very select group of (U.S.) government agencies, with the occasional pro forma business customer thrown in so the company can issue press releases. Even most government facilities aren't in a position to buy a cray anymore. (Research money is fairly tight, recoding costs are prohibative, MTBF's are more of an issue then they used to be, etc.)
Oh!.... that Cray!
Never mind!85 replies, even the trolls, and not one "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" post.
Can't a guy count on slashdot for anything anymore?
--
My next couch should be a Cray..
In SOVIET RUSSIA, Super Computer buys DARPA!
Oh and imagine a beowulf cluster....
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
I thought Sun Microsystems bought the "supercomputer" technology and turned that
into the E10K and E15K product line?
one can hope they can make a real comeback, but I am not entirely hopeful. Cray has a notoriously cantankerous culture (much of the acrimony when they fell under SGI was of their own doing, as they even refused to get SGI business cards for ages, spending more time being defiant to SGI than anything else - like finding customers). I am curious as to how they are under Tera's custody.
Especially because it's so much easier to hide a computer than an airplane. No sightings in area 51....
We have to assume that the state of the art is way past the public data. Cray has a "lousy" $150 MM in yearly revenue. They could be spending 10X that on heavy computing for national security. The government is spending $25BB on intelligence and another $400 BB on defense every year. Cray could be a drop in the bucket, even a red herring. I'd love to know what is going on in the basements at Fort Meade.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
In the 1970's and 1980's, Cray and other supercomputer companies fit in the niche of "fastest computing at any cost". The design cycles were long for the specialized hardware that pushed the boundaries of the available technology. Companies and government agencies were willing to pay the high price since there was enough processing speed difference between the supercomputers and the "vanilla" computers.
By the early 1990's, the "attack of the killer microprocessors" came. The PC class processors were still weak, but the higher dollar RISC processors used in workstations, like Sun, were reaching performance levels close to what the supercomputers were able to deliver. Since they were based on higher volume and more standardized processors, the price/performance of the RISC workstations started eating into the mainframe and supercomputer market. Many of the supercomputer companies died off, and some started to incorporate RISC processors into their designs. By the mid 1990's I believe that Tera and Cray were the last remaining old-school supercomputer companies left. The rest either died or were absorbed into other companies.
Today, the investment required to produce the fastest processor chips is so high that it requires large unit volumes to pay for the cost of development and production. The PC class processors, with their high volumes, are putting pressure on the old style workstation market, where each company makes their own processor (SPARC/Sun, PA-RISC/HP, Alpha/DEC). We see Sun struggling as the PC's eat their market. Even some large scale supercomputers are based on the PC processors. The majority of the computer spectrum from low to high end is based on the same families of processors (Intel, AMD, PowerPC).
So that brings us to Cray/Tera. Cray seems to go against the economics of scale that drive the rest of the computing industry. What keeps them running is a small niche that the government is willing to keep funded. It is similar to the funding of exotic bombers and fighter jets. We probably won't see Cray grow much larger than they currently are. They be kept running since they form a critical part of the national security, at least that is what the government believes.
God, I could just go on forever. As a compuational chemist, I basically spend my life being clever because the machines at the supercomputer institute aren't fast enough to finish a calculation before I die, or don't have 6000GB of memory to hold a matrix of all of my possible configurations.
But seriously, Cray is about 75 miles south from me. It would be really cool to take a tour of their plant and see the X-1 in person. At best my dual PIII 1GHz machine is good for about 640 MegaFlops, but just one of the X-1 node modules is 50 GigaFlops =) X-1 video
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Supercomputing per se died because Intel, DEC, IBM/Motorola had a lot more money to throw at speeding things up than the supercomputing community.
In the 70's up until the early 90's it was possible to build a custom CPU out of discrete logic that ran significantly faster than the available microprocessors. Cray was able to push their clock cycle down into the nanosecond range through clever design. However, a 1ns clock rate == 1GHz. You can go buy that multi-million dollar CPU for a couple of hundred bucks in today's market.
In order for superocmputing to be viable you have to be able to provide quantum leap performance above the commodity hardware AND keep your cost/performance ratio in line as well.
The CRAY-1 came out with a clock speed of about 80 MHz and vector processing and high memory bandwidth at a time when mainstream systems like the PDP 11/70 were running at about 7MHz with a 1MB/s memory bus. Microprocessors weren't even't a joke compared with the Cray.
The new Japanese NEC supercomputer came with a price tag of about $160 million if I remember correctly (some estimates say that it took $1G in research funding) and hits 35 TFlops (sustained). #3 on the Top 500 supercomputers list is a Beowulf cluster with 2304 processors coming in at 7.6 TFlops (sustained). Even figuring $2000/processor + interconnect, that puts the Beowulf cluster at around $5 million or 1/32 of the cost for 1/5th of the performance (roughly speaking).
There are other factors, of course, but the key is that for the supercomputer to stay ahead of the microprocessor a boatload of funding is needed for the supercomputer and the payoff just isn't really there. If it was a lot more supercomputer companies would still be in business.
^H is Control H which is the backspace code on old terminals
Cray vs. goatse.cx
CRAY VS. Microsoft
Wow cray is doing better than microsoft and SCO is doing better than cray...
THANKS ALOT
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables.
You're right and all, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that it's not necessarily sucha qualitative difference as you suggest. First, pick the numebr of variables that you want to use. Now, it's a static problem, and the only difference between two machines is how fast each one will solve it.
On th other hand, you've got a good point, in that the difference can be "all-or-nothing" for a given problem if it crosses an externally-imposed threshold, such that the results are only timely for so long, and are only useful if they come within that period. A weather "prediction" program that doesn't complete until after the weather has happened is still intellectually interesting (worth doing for evaluating the post-dictive power of your model, and in anticipation of someday having a faster computer), but you could have just looked out the window.
Oh, and the other way that a more powerful computer can be qualitatively superior is if your dataset / model / algorithm requires more memory than the smaller computer has, so it can't run at all.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
The Earth Simulator proved the power of custom vector processors (over conventional microprocessors). The design of these vector processors are not limited unless backwards compatibility is needed (I don't think that is a real requirement). This means that there are many possible architectures that could be used to implement the vector processor. The largest problem that I have building ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) is proving the power/area/performance trade-offs between different architechures. It usually takes a couple of weeks to build an architecture to benchmark... it is difficult to keep a team working on target, while listing ideas for the next itteration. No offense against Cray, but Japanese engineers are very good at the itterative design approach (I learned this while doing my MSEE in Japan). Also, I would think that the same engineers who designed the Earth Simulator 3 years ago have been busy in the mean time... learning and improving on the design of their successful processor. Cray has some product offerings, however I would think that they would be limited in their practical design knowledge due to their lack of a prototype on the scale of the Earth Simulator. People can invest in Cray all they want.. good luck! But, even if Ford stock went through the roof, I'm still going to drive a Toyota.
The Sandia National Labs supercomputer (code name: Red Storm), currently being built by Cray, is going to be powered by 10,000 Opteron processors. A 40 Teraflop theoretical peak will put it at the top of the supercomputer list, being approximately 4 Teraflops faster than the NEC Earth Simulator, the current champ.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I really want to see cray come out with more waterfall computers. I thought that was the greatest thing in the world when I saw it on Beyond2000! way back in the day. The contemporary "elegant mac" isn't even in the same aesthetic/functional dimension as that cray machine.
Ah, glory days.
"Don't get me wrong I'm all about nuclear testing being done in 1's and 0's instead of in the ocean or in the desert, but how big of a bomb do you really need when it's estimated theres enough nukes to blast the entire land surface of the earth 3 times over. "
Much of the research is into how those weapons are degrading whilst kept unused. Nukes 'rot' as their internals and detonators are exposed to hard radiation, and are time consuming to dissasemble and test.
Also, waste storage, groundwater contamination simulation.
Materials science takes some serious number crunching too.
That's like Ferrari selling a cheap-ass subcompact shopping cart. Cute idea for folks who can't get the real deal, but it aint gonna happen. And if it does, don't expect home market pricing - eg, SGI's Intel Workstation affair.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Can you put a grand piano in a pinto?
Technically, I guess you could, but you'd have to:
disassemble the piano
put into pintos
take out and reassemble the piano, then test for quality.
Isn't it much easier to shove a piano into a van?
Now, if you are moving the pianos a long distance and the pintos can drive faster than the van, maybe the time wasted tearing down the piano can be made up.
IANAL, but I play one on
A "cluster" is basically geared at performing jobs that are "chunkable," in that there are (usually very many) operations that need to be done, and can be done on distinct "node" with minimal knowledge of other similar operations happening on other node. A perfect example is rendering. One node in the cluster could deal with a certain range of pixels. The same for the next node, and the next. Eventually, when all of the nodes have finished rendering their "chunks," some "glue code" can be used to assemble these chunks into the final product (a complete frame, or series of frames, in the rendering example).
This is equivalent to a bunch of people (CPUs) working in small teams (nodes) to build a pyramid using many similar blocks. Each team knows what they need (a big limestone cube of certain dimensions), can provide this without knowledge of the others, and some teams can be faster than others or even die of the plague. No matter, the pyramid gets built, chunk by chunk.
A traditional supercomputer has a single system image, where all CPUs have access to all memory, and can work with one another on the same operations. Everything works together, synchronously. The equivalent to this is picking up and moving the pyramid.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Your point about supercomputer design is well taken. A ton of value in the supercomputer landscape actually comes in the form of operating system and compiler design. They go a long way to make message passing and other sorts of HPC tricks easy and efficient to implement.
MS Office would still probably suck...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
A processor fails, on average, say once every 10 years.
So you'd expect the CPU in your computer to fry every 10 years or so, if you kept it that long.
The reason you have more issues with multi-processor supercomputers is that.. gasp.. you have MORE PROCESSORS.
Put 1,000 processors in a machine, and intead of 1 failure every 10 years, you get one failure every 3.65 days. And that's just CPUs.
paintball
is there a secret message here? should tom ridge be called?
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Tom Ridge, huh? He any kin to Ruby Ridge?
(Lame snickering in background)
Number of TFLOPS isn't everything. The move back to vector style processors in super computing has been largely inspired by the fact that beowulf clusters work really well for some problems - and very, very poorly for others. If you've got a problem that divides nicely into discrete chunks that don't require a lot of interprocessor communication, then yeah, sure go with beowulf. But complex simulation problems have a tendancy to leave most of the processors idling while the cluster talks to itself due to network speed issues.
Why?
I just spewed tequila out my nostrils.
Get used to it!
I read it somewhere in the Urantia Book.
As close as we get, our top of the line desktop computers still cannot be compared to supercomputers and mainframes of years ago.
The reason is that our computers were not designed to move huge amounts of data - they were designed to move large amounts of data a little at a time.
Of course crays will still be needed. Even as fast as the fastest connections you can get now between processors and data storage, mainframes and supercomputers are still faster if only because they transfer it in such large chunks.
-Adam
SRC Computers is his legacy, not Cray Computer Corp.
He co-founded this company (with several other
ex-Cray employees) and died while still an employee/owner.
Interestingly, SRC is still around without any evidence on their website
of shipping a product. My guess is that their customers and/or investors
prefer to stay out of the limelight.
What a poor choice of acronym. How confusing.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
I've been using Desktop Cray for a while now. It took me some time to weak the settings to perfection, but now it's just running along. Check it out!
/Styx
VA Linux
Yes, but....did you notice that the NEC machine is 5120 processors? It's massively parallel too.
The key, though, is development $$. And development $$ requires either big sales $$ or big $$ from government.
Cray, in 1994, probably one of their better years, had revenues of $920 million and spent $140 million on R&D. Cray was always the best funded of the supercomputer companies, however when you're trying to develop fast silicon $140 million does not go far.
Considering the fact that your chart only shows AFAIK the change in value. It doesn't really tell us much. But I can play this game too:
SCO vs Cray vs DJIA
By that Chart, SCO must be 1000x better then the Dow Jones!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I'm no expert on High Performance Computing. But I know a few, and none of them think that Vector Computing was killed off by government policy. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But John Markoff presenting just one side of the argument as Proven Fact is pretty pathetic. Some tech journalists don't seem to know anything except what they were told at their last Dog and Pony Show.
Tom Ridge won't care but Tom Clancy might be very interested. Sounds like another asinine use of the DMCA is on the way...
Laws are for people with no friends.
Let's see, a P/E of over 62. hrmm.. someone didn't learn their lesson a during the dot bomb implosion. A little comparison time... Oracle has a P/E just over 27. Microsoft is just over 28. Cisco is just under 42. IBM is around 21.
Is Cray poised for a comeback? Using technology, it's possible.. sure. Just learn to read the stock market a bit better before you think a company is on stable ground.
-AC
Most of the posters against supercomputers argue relentlessly based on "economies of scale". Aren't we geeks? Isn't there aesthetic value in building a really specialized machine simply to smoke through a small set of problems? Why the blind love for more and more Intel or AMD processors?
I mean, if sameness were the thing that mattered, then, why not just give up the whole Linux crusade and accept Windows and all Microsoft standards for everything? I'm sure we could get distributed processing software working on Windows, for scientific applications. Windows has sockets, it has languages, one could build a networking computing application on top of it...
Let's remember that it's not just necessarily about solutions, its about acceptance of alternative approaches and a desire to unmask the unknown.
This is my sig.
Don't call it a comeback.
John Markoff, the same jerkoff that wrote the less then factual articles and book about kevin mitnick, and happens to belong to one of the less reputable media outles (aka the plagarized and false stories coming from the ny times).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Wall St. can't buy it, whatever it is... Cray Inc has more shares outstanding than Cray Research did in its heyday approaching $1B/yr sales. Anybody on Wall St. who thinks this stock is going up like the old Cray simply hasn't done their homework. As other posters have pointed out, vectors are cool and have a place but way too much of the everyday supercomputer work can be handled by clusters and such. They have a niche and its cool but don't expect it to grow like the last Cray did.
The really frightening thing about Cray is the people in control (Seattle) built a computer that doesn't work (Tera) and the people not in control (Mpls / Chippewa Falls) are generating all the revenue with their boxes that do work. Too bad they have to carry Burton Smith around on their backs.
No insider info here. You can find all this and more in the annual reports. Happy reading.
However it happens, it is unlikely Cray was wrong about Gallium Arsenide -- he was not stupid. The question is when will a bureaucratic organization be able to throw marching morons at the problem and make it happen -- since that appears to be the only way technology is funded anymore.
It's unfortunate Seymour allowed Cray, Inc. to keep his name after he left to found CCC. Even though Cray himself was capitulating to massively parallel silicon in his final days -- he did die almost immediately thereafter.
PS: It seems creepy he died in a "jeeping accident" -- because that's exactly the way I had portrayed him dying in an April fools joke faxed to all members of congress a few years before -- an "accident" following shortly on the heels of CCC being taken over by Craig Fields of DARPA. I was sending out the joke because of the horrifying way DARPA had spent money on silly favorites within the academic community while guys who were really pushing the envelope like Seymour were going begging for customers -- having acquired private investments.
Seastead this.
The CPUs the beowulf clusters are all vector
processors too. SSE2 and all that.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I think there is one single reason that the market is poised for a Cray comeback... HEAT!
Commodity PCs managed to push the speed envelope by pushing the heat envelope... That's the main reason AMD took the speed advantage, because they were willing to operate their processors at higher temperatures than Intel would at the time.
Now, I would say it's quite a different story. First off, processors are getting closer and closer to the end of the line for heat increases.. Pretty soon, no known metal will be able to conduct heat away fast enough to allow computers to operate at room-temperatures. Even now, dumb little personal computers need serious cooling solutions... Either that, or they need to be some place that has serious air conditioning.
So, what are companies going to do, even with the current line of processors? Should they invest loads of money in dispersing waste heat, powerful air conditioners, system cooling fans, and software and/or hardware to closely monitor temperatures? OR Should they invest in a higher-end system that doesn't put off so much heat, doesn't use up so much electricity, etc?
In fact, I think we are even nearing the point where home users are going to get seriously pissed off and start demanding lower-power systems... It's interesting that C3 processors have become so popular despite their lowsy perfomance... (Maybe AMD/Intel will learn something from that)
So, I do think that either commodity processors will hit the heat ceiling, and stagnate like the rotational speeds of current IDE hard drives, OR the electrical and major cooling requirements of commodity processors will become too much to justify the small price savings. Either way, that will leave the market wide open for serious computing companies once again. The only question really is how much longer will it be until one of those two things happens? Well, in the Southern California Desert, electricty prices are still very high, and the temperatures are so very high that running a modern computer 24 hours a day requires your home cooling to also be running 24 hours a day, just to operate within the heat tolerances. I don't think it will be much longer before more of the country, and the world, will reach the same point.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Lot of people playing down vector processors here today without having read up on what they are, don't lump vector-processors in with general purpose mainframes and such.
It's not just more variables, although that is a factor, it's about how many gridpoints you can use to represent the physical domain your model covers. For instance, today's predictive models which cover the day-to-day weather over North America or Europe use too coarse a grid to "see" thunderstorms - they just don't exist because the spacing of the gridpoints is too large for such a "small" phenomenon to occur within the model. Faster computers with more memory will allow forecast models to be able to see the atmosphere more realistically from small scale features to large scale features.
As a meteorologist with lots of modeling experience, I can say with a lot of confidence that you simply can't throw too much computational power at atmospheric modeling. Personally, I won't be happy until our global models are running at 1 centimeter resolution up to the thermosphere.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
It will be banned by the government as you'll be able to mod chip it to control cruise missiles...
-- Leeeter than leet
For a nuclear winter.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I tend to agree...
In past lives I've worked with career spooks and even had a few of my own visits to the NSA (no I've never been to Fort Meade - any real spook groupie knows that the Infosec guys in "X" were up at the "Friendship Annex" by BWI...).
But it was an infrequent but not common practice at vendors that some systems to certain customers would be delivered by leaving a trailer at location X where it would disappear for a few days then they would get a call to pick up the trailer at Y.
There is also a verification process to sell to private and foreign customers to verify that systems aren't going to the wrong people.
But the real question is that now that Cray is Cray again will they start shipping a case of Leine's with every system like they used to? (Probably not given that manufacturing is no longer in Chippewa Falls, WI).
How many PetaFlops is your average 3ghz PC?
Come now, they may be short vectors, but they are
every bit vectors. And yes, I've written CAL code.
And vectorizing compilers.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
One has to draw the line somewhere, sure they are vectors but a 32 bit word is a vector of bits as far as a binary and instruction is concerned, no one could imagine calling a binary and a vector instruction though.
Strictly speaking I admit that your position probably is the much more common one when it comes to the terminology though :)
So, what is the real win on vector operations? When I was first learning about vector architectures in the late 80's, at first I thought that the advantage the vector processor brought was that it crunched the whole vector simultaneously. I was very disappointed when I discovered that the majority of implementations had a max of 4 arithmetic units.
:-). What I learned is that the win for vectors (unless modern units have a boatload more processing units) is that the memory I/O is much faster into and out of the registers, there is no loop overhead and accessing the registers by the arithmetic units is very fast.
As part of my learning experience I was tasked with writing a simulator for our next generation processor so we could start fudging benchmarks early
When I was at FPS we were discussing an i860 based array co-processor. I wonder if anyone has thought of building a vector unit around a set of Pentium or PowerPC chips? They could emulate vector instructions with the registers being held in a shared cache. With proper coding there would be no need for interlocking and the "registers" (emulated by the cache) should be able to blow data in and out of an interleaved memory system as fast as any regular vector unit would.
It's not caused by anything.
Back in the olden days, Ctrl-H was also the command code for backspace.
^ means control.
Basically it's the net-speak version of "VA Linu.. er.. Software. *Wink Wink*"