Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Now if I could only get my CRAY-fish collection to have the same credit...
Now is your chance
Yeah, cause in 10 minutes it'll be slashdotted...
Give me a job. Please?
He should have hosted it on one of his Crays
can you imagine the AC (both power and cooling)demand for a good quake bake? :)
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
Ever wanted to see inside a Cray T3D MPP, or maybe the gargantuan machine that is the T90? Now is your chance!
You mean now as in tomorrow when the slashdotting is over.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Here are the images, mirrored:
t3d_2_big.jpg
td3_psus_big.jpg
t3d_wiring_big.jpg
t90_2_big.jpg
t90_system_board_big.jpg
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.
-Teiresias
Working Link
... one of those big super computers with all of the blinking lights and huge spool of tape spinning around. I've even known a few companies that were "disposing" of them. Unfortunatly, like most Mac owners, their policy tends to be "Throw it out. Don't let anyone else have it", so to this day, I am supercomputerless
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
this makes me miss the days of trs80's and writing basic code that you saved to a tape recorder.
this makes me miss punch cards and the fear you had of getting them out of order.
it makes me miss...ti calculators where if you held down three of the corner keys, the thing would bypass the on button.
sigh...i miss the old days.
Is it 5:30 yet?
(years of beer have killed a few neurons, so memory's a bit fuzzy... :-) )
Mirror dot has mirrored the link here.
Steam Locos
Steam Traction Engines
Brunnels Suspension Bridge
Model T Ford
Stutz Bearcat
AC Cobra 427
GT 40
Jaguar D Type
All of these could be seen as scrap metal but to some people they become important. It's the same with old computers, what I would give to run a some jobs on a B4955, nostalgia has great value.
Given the current malaise of the computing industry looking forward and back to better times is a way of get over the crap we currently have to deal with.
And therein lies the problem. Most super-computers were purpose-built and are thus not too useful for general purpose programs. Some optimizations that have been done to these machines means that a 486 might even be faster on certain code!
It's a lot like comparing a luxury yacht to an aircraft carrier. Sure, the carrier is pretty damn cool, has lots of capacity, and lots of features. Unfortunately, the carrier is probably not going to move an inch without a full crew and military grade servicing. All of those great things you thought you would get from buying an old carrier, you find would have been better served with a new yacht.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Cray sold a computer to a company I worked for, for the sum of (raises finger to mouth) ONE POUND. Bwahahaha.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
... or, if you're ever near Mountain View, California, why not see them in person (and a whole lot more)?
Computer History Museum website
http://templar.storyinmemo.com/
SIG: HUP
Can anyone tell me how fast these things are compared with, say, an Athlon 2000+?
the real question is: why would you want to?
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
It's kind of creepy walking down the halls of this place. From one room you hear: "Stop, Dave. I'm afraid.". From another: "The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...does he have a Gibson?
Another one bites the dust
Armari can also put you together a decent high-end workstation.
Back in the day (c. 1999) I needed a new workstation. Armari set me up with Dual PIII-400's, LVD-SCSI HD, lots of RAM. Man that was a dream machine in it's day. Set me back of the (then) equivalent of $5,000 but it cut through my compliations like a knife through butter.
Still running. Man it's a crap machine now though!
http://www.whitepost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mirror/t 3d_2_big.jpg t 3d_psus_big.jpg t 90_2_big.jpg t 3d_wiring_big.jpg t 90_system_board_big.jpg
http://www.whitepost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mirror/
http://www.whitepost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mirror/
http://www.whitepost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mirror/
http://www.whitepost.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mirror/
This is a guy's PRIVATE, PERSONAL Cray collection:
h tm
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jamescurry/index.
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.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I wonder if any computer system collectors have any IBM System/360 machines that are still in operation.
S/360 is interesting because it was one of the first standardized architectures created by a computer company. Before that, each seperate machine had its own instruction set and architecture, and they were incompatible with each other.
A mid-sized functional IBM System/360 is quite a sight. Multiple cabinets of core memory, CPU cabinets, tape systems, consoles with thousands of blinkenlights... A real fun system to watch in operation.
Hopefully someone out there still operates one for fun. It's expensive, but we have rich geeks right? }:)
-Z
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.
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.
Oh, I'm sorry. Allow me to fix that:
1inuk5 ROXORS!!!
M$$$$$F7 SUXORS!!!
Dude, I'm so 31337!!!
Can you imaging a beowulf cluster of these?
I for one, welcome our new Super-Computer overlords.
???, Profit!!!
7H47'5 7H3 5P0K3!
Hot grits
Natalie Portman
See? Content. I'll bet I'll get modded down for it though. Slashdotters NEVER appreciate any real content.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I visited these dudes a few years ago, when down at my friends employers and visiting their cuppliers (Armari). Got loads of pictures of the Cray T3d right here. Wonderful machine, wonderfully kept. :-)
Dans machine wasn't quite (apparently) 'the first off the production line - Edinburgh uni (where this T3D came from) wanted one that could be upgraded without a lot of hassle. Cray could only offer them this one, which was their testbed unit, wired for a full complement of processors, but not fully populated. That's why it's innards are absolutely stuffed full of wires. Each wire is also a specific length, to ensure that the length of time it takes for electricity to flow down the wire is accurately accounted for in terms of clock ticks.
The power switch that the author wished he'd taken a picture of is here
I loved Dans demo of the differing weight of cooling liquids. He had a milk bottle full of water, weighing a kilo or so, and then an identical bottle weighing about 3 kilos. The plumbing for the liquid cooling was done by a bottling plant systems manufacturer in Daytona if memory serves, and the metal braided hoses that are used in it are of the same type used in Formula One and Nascar cars. Wicked stuff
Please give an example of any piece of code that runs faster on a 486 than any machine ever classified as a supercomputer. No? Didn't think so.
Most forms of user-interactive programs or branch-heavy logic. You see, many supercomputers used EXTREMELY long memory pipelines that placed the processor 100+ clocks behind the memory being fetched. A single branching instruction usually resulted in a task switch to the next queued process, thus keeping processor usage high.
The end result is that these machines could crunch streaming data at an extraordinary rate, but couldn't compete directly with scalar processors for branching performance. I believe that's the reason that VAX front-ends were used on Crays. Running a user interface on the Cray would have caused a great deal of interruption in the processor's duties, and thus would have substantially decreased performance.
Wikipedia (yes, I love to piss off you anti-WP people) has an explanation of vector processors. Take careful note of the section on pipelining, as that is the key to both the supercomputer performance, as well as the lack thereof.
I'm confused.
Yes, we know. Otherwise you wouldn't post as an AC.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If you want to get up close to the Cray Supercomputers of the past, visit the Chippewa Falls Museum Of Industry and Technology in Chippewa Falls, WI. It is about one hour and 45 min. east of Minneapolis, MN. The museum is open daily. Adults can get in for $3.00
Site: my.execpc.com/~cfmit/
Museum of Industry and Technology
21 East Grand Avenue
Chippewa Falls, WI 54729
715.720.9206 tel
The University of Minnesota also has a Virtual Cray Museum. http://www.cbi.umn.edu/exhibits/cray/index.html
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Eh. You can run a J90 in your house. Its aircooled and just takes two 20 amp 220 circuits.
I helped test out that very pictured T3D machine on the lab floor in Chippewa Falls. I helped simulate the chipset for the T3D and wrote diagnostics to test it. I became the resident expert on the "barrier channel" which was a mechanism used for both syncronization and for low bandwidth one-to-all communication.
Of course, being the very first system, 6001's barrier channel had a bunch of issues to resolve. Armed with just a prom-emulator (each cpu used a serial prom to load it's initial bootcode) and a Tektronics O-scope with a couple probes, I managed to come up with some primitive diagnostics written in assembly to let us determine what was going wrong on the barrier channel. IIRC, there were some banks miswired and some delay signals set wrong which were causing the problems. Once we got past that hurdle, the rest of the bring up went fairly smooth.
The next box built, SN6002, went to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and I was fortunate enough to go on the install trip with it. I really enjoyed all the work I did on the T3D, as I got to work with it from design stage, thru test & bringup and eventually travel out to customer sites.