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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.
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.
memory bandwidth
Bandwidth.
Well, a well engineered supercomputer has much less overhead than a cluster. One superfast processor doesn't have to deal with interprocessor communcations like a cluster does.
And if your supercomputer has multiple processors, they are generally made to cooperate nicely to speed efficiency. Whereas a cluster has to go through ethernet and hardware layers to communicate between nodes. Granted that is fast, but on-board communication is faster.
It seems strange, but a multiple processor computer can actually perform a task slower than just one processor working on the problem if the program and os aren't designed well. So a lot of the value of a supercomputer comes in its design, and the reputation of the manufacturer. And Cray is pretty reliable in my book.
But the REAL key to the potential comeback of the Cray computer will be whether or not it still has cool bubbles! Wow!!! Cray computing... the inventor of case mods.
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Memory to processor feeding: std ots processors are often idle because the memory subsystem cannot feed the processor fast enough. This is bad now. It will be getting a lot worse.
Interconnections between processors: this goes beyond merely processors on a board, but between boxes. The bus architectures out there for the std ots hardware get saturated very quickly. This gets worse between boxes. In addition the latency on Myranet and Quadrics (compared to what Cray et al do) is horrible even if it is excellent compared to ethernet.
Problem set vs architecture: Not all problems map out well to clusters, or even SMP boxen. Some map best to vector machines. Some map best to tightly integrated MPPs. Some map out to moderately tight clusters. Some are just plain 'embarassingly parallel'. Others are highly threaded and don't work well on vector or scalar machines. etc, etc. The architecture ought to match the problem set.
MTBF: Mean time between failures. Commodity hardware goes kaputt much more often. A cluster capable of teraflop performance of custom hardware tends to need constant and evil levels of care and feeding: ie you better have a grad student on roller blades.
Those are just off the top of my head. I am sure that others will Tell you others before I can post again. ;)
Summarized: bandwidth, latency, problem set, and failure rate.
HTH.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
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.
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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?
Second, (yes, I work for Cray so now I'm going to put in a sales pitch
Finally, there's memory. Lots of it. A single system image supercomputer can have terabytes of memory in one kernel image. You're simply not going to get that in a single PC cabinet.
Finally, in case anyone doubts that vectors, big memory, and large bandwidth can make a good system, the fastest machine in the world right now is the Japanese "Earth Simulator" machine which is an NEC SX machine. That is somewhat similar in architecture to a Cray in that it has large bandwidth and vectors.
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From this site, you can see the breakdown by organization:There are a lot of companies that use supercomputers, although maybe not the type you're thinking of. Of course, there are the number-crunchers: oil companies are big users (to crunch data & find new oil), and car companies (BMW). But there are also the transaction-processors, like SprintPCS and Ebay (used to be in the top 500), that make the list just by the sheer number of connected processors.
Here's the latest list
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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.
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.
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The waterfall Cray is the T90 and that's not water, but Fluorinert. I've seen one in person. Talk about cool furniture.
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
I work in the Oil&Gas business and we use Linux clusters (and in the past bloody large Sun, IBM and SGI systems) for seismic processing and reservoir simulation. These particular problems are DSP and FP intensive and also can require a fairly large amount of memory to run. They are exactly the kind of commercial workload either a supercomputer or cluster can chew on.
Some of our customers (I work for a company that writes the software, amongst other things) have upwards of 100TB of 3D Seismic they want to process. These jobs can take weeks or months to run. The simulation jobs can take days as well. Obviously having a big computer or tight cluster of lots of small ones will help decisions get made faster and/or more accurately.
There are other examples too: I met a gentleman who works for the lab that does crash simulation for Porsche, Audi and VW. Another example would be an ex-boss of mine who went to work for an engine manufacturer, who used a couple of SGIs to simulate the bore and stroke in a cylinder. The simulation took several weeks to run. They need large computers to do this too. So there is a market for these machines.