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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."
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
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.)