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A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers

Posted by timothy on from the they-rest-for-a-bit dept.

Steve writes "Every geek has wanted to play with a Cray supercomputer. Hexus.net had the rare opportunity to meet up with a man who has something of a fetish for collecting them! They got a look at some of the amazing kit Armari - a systems integration company - have in their possession. Ever wanted to see inside a Cray T3D MPP, or maybe the gargantuan machine that is the T90? Now is your chance!"

6 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mirror dot has mirrored the link here.

  2. Computer History Museum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... or, if you're ever near Mountain View, California, why not see them in person (and a whole lot more)?

    Computer History Museum website

  3. Mirror Slashdotted... My Turn To Mirror by autocracy · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://templar.storyinmemo.com/

    --
    SIG: HUP
  4. Seymour Cray by cloud99 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Seymour Cray never designed the T3D supercomputer. Seymour split from Cray Research Inc (CRI) to found Cray Computer Corp (CCC) in 1989. At CCC he designed the GaAs Cray-3 and stillborn Cray-4. After CCC folded in 1995 he founded SRC Computers which was his first attempt at using commodity CPUs. SRC exists to this day but changed focus after Seymour's death in 1996. Other crayons may have better info but I believe that Steve Chen designed the T3D at CRI. Those of us who knew Seymour still miss him. He was quite simply the smartest man I have ever met.

  5. T90 not an MPP by flaming-opus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Considering how tech savy the author seems to be, it's interesting that he doesn't understand what an MPP is. The T3d IS an mpp, made in response to a wave of mpp designs in the late 80's taking some of cray's market share (thinking machines, paragon, etc) MPP, incidently, stands for Massively Parallel Processing; massively as in hundreds, not 32.

    The T90, on the other hand, is a pure SMP. The processors all sit on a shared bus (actually 256 parallel shared buses). Each CPU was really fast (for the time) and had really big pipes to memory, and really expensive.

    Sorry, just picking nits.

  6. Re:So how fast are they exactly? by owdi · · Score: 3, Informative

    A 2ghz Athlon can pull just over 3 GFlops.

    The T90 had 32 x 450mhz CPUs that could do 4 ops per cycle, which comes out to 1.8GFlops per chip and 57.6Gflops for the whole shebang.

    The real differnce however is not raw cpu horsepower, but memory bandwidth, latency, and scaling. I don't know nearly enough about supercomputers to be able to explain that in detail.

    -Dan