A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers

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!"

Comments

Mummies of the digital age

[teiresias]

the mummies of the digital age. we're like treasure hunters only instead of jewels and crowns we're looking for gold lined circuit boards.

So how fast are they exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone tell me how fast these things are compared with, say, an Athlon 2000+?

Re:Ah.. memories

[Ford Prefect]

At my former university, they had a corridor with a glass wall which went past the machine room full of supercomputers, many with flashy-looking blinkenlights arranged into grids or in the form of graphical processor-monitoring screens. There were often some weird and wonderful smaller machines, like some Linux-running, Itanium-powered (according to the labels) SGI workstations - this was late 2000, early 2001 or so, and I haven't seen a single Itanic since...

The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article. :-)

bah, small fish

[telemonster]

This is a guy's PRIVATE, PERSONAL Cray collection:

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jamescurry/index.h tm

It has to be the most comprehensive collection of Cray systems in the world (including Cray's facility in Chippawa falls?).

(Please do not post it on the front page of slashdot without digibarns permission). Those pictures are quite a bit outdated, as he no longer lives in that state and has added more systems since then.

I believe he had over 11 before. He donated a few to someone, I forget who.

Re:Now is pretty short...

[Analogy Man]

I wonder if the electrical infrastrucutre and hvac engineering hardware could be effectively reused with modern processors?

I recall studying an early (Nazi Germany era) jet engine. It had all kinds of very sophisticate systems (e.g. liquid cooled turbine blades) to get around metalurgical limitations. Some of the features actually went from nearly 50 years before they were implemented again when materials technologies were a limitation and exotic work-arounds were required.

Yes, history may have passed these CRAY machines by, but the engineering problems once solved may be encountered again and it would be a shame to disregard that research because the "big iron" is "old iron".