Slashdot Mirror
On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis
scoobrs writes "Experts claim America has been eating our 'supercomputer feed corn' by developing clusters rather than new supercomputer processors and interconnects. Forbes says America is playing catch-up and that the new federal budget items are too little too late. Cray is laying people off due to decreased federal spending and claims lower margin products have forced them to create products based on commodity parts. Red Storm, one of their new Linux-based products, is being delayed to next year."
Well, I don't have that kind of money, but if I did, I'd rather get me an older Cray than a cluster of beige-box PCs. If nothing else, Cray machines are classy and impressive, and when we make clients visit the premises, we can go "oh, and this is the Cray computer, crunching at numbers for you" and look at the customer being impressed, as opposed to "oh yeah, that pile of nondescript computer, that's the 1000-node beowulf cluster of AMD Cheaperon computers". I'm sure the extra value in marketting would be worth it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So, what tasks still require a high-speed shared data memory?
A high-speed shared memory test program?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
And in other news today, buggy whip manufacturers demand increased government subsidies.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
This reminds of a Quote from Cray. It goes something like, "Would you rather have 1024 chickens pulling a wagon or a big Ox."