Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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!"

20 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Now is pretty short... by apanap · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now is your chance

    Yeah, cause in 10 minutes it'll be slashdotted...

    --
    Give me a job. Please?
    1. Re:Now is pretty short... by Analogy+Man · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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".

      --
      When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
  2. Slashdotted Already?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    He should have hosted it on one of his Crays

  3. yeah, sure by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!!!!
  4. Mummies of the digital age by teiresias · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  5. Ive always wanted... by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... 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
  6. Ah.. memories by Quixote · · Score: 4, Funny
    Reminds me of the first time I saw a Cray T3D at the Los Alamos National labs (about 10 years ago, in 1994). The door had this funky LCD display with some graphics on it. As we were watching the water-cooled behemoth inside, the person incharge there said, "watch this" hit a button on the inside of the door. The LCD display went "bing" and a Mac logo popped up! It was a Mac, being used just for the prettiness.

    (years of beer have killed a few neurons, so memory's a bit fuzzy... :-) )

    1. Re:Ah.. memories by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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. :-)

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  7. Mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mirror dot has mirrored the link here.

  8. Re:YMP... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  9. Price tag by Raedwald · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  10. 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

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

    http://templar.storyinmemo.com/

    --
    SIG: HUP
  12. So how fast are they exactly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    1. 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

  13. Re:mirror. by Tackhead · · Score: 4, Funny
    > 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

    Slashdot.
    Porn for Nerds. JPGs that matter.

  14. Overheard in the rest home. by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  15. bah, small fish by telemonster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
  16. 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.

  17. 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.