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Cray Co-Founder Joins Microsoft
ergo98 writes "Burton Smith, co-founder and chief scientist at Cray (The Supercomputer Company), has jumped ship. He's joining Microsoft to help them with their clustered computer initiative. Burton joins Microsoft as a technical fellow."
Microsoft also announced Windows Vista will require a Cray supercomputer to run.
Just a few things
First, didn't someone say that Cray was bought out, and it's only the name and reputation of Cray that survives, but some other company actually does it now?
second, Microsoft might as well not even bother with clustering - they're so far behind the game that there's almost no way they can catch up.
Third, the obligatory comment
A thousand BSODs a thousand times faster!
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
but I misunderstood the ad in the paper, and mistakenly applied for the position of "jolly good fellow".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I read this as "Crazy co-founder joins MS"
I was thinking "How crazy do you have to be? Crazy enough to throw a chair?"
Argh.
Windows Cluster Edition System Requirements:
... and they will still claim it has lower TCO then Linux!
- 128 CPUs
- 100 GB RAM
- 30 square metres of floorspace
- Liquid Nitrogen cooling system
--
Don't read between the lines, the real interesting stuff
is below the line you just read.
Bill Gates: The Microsoft Side is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural... Burton Smith: Is it possible to learn this power? Bill Gates: Not if you stay at Cray...
Burton was the co-founder of "Tera", the supercomputer company that purchased the old Cray division away from SGI in their 1999 restructuring.
Tera was founded to develop massively multithreaded machines. After their big purchase, they took the Cray name for continuity with Cray's old customers and products, along with the fact that it's a much more viable "commercial" supercomputing name.
Isn't Cray hardware and software completely proprietary? If so, no wonder MS is interested in teaming up with Burton Smith. However, as this article suggests, Linux is way ahead of the curve in this arena.
Linux may not ever truly catch on in the desktop environment, but in high-end computing, it's a proven winner.
Burton Smith took a two week training course in several stages for this:
1. The mouse - what is it? 2. How to use the mouse. 3. Learn to click [OK] without thinking. 4. Timing - measure your bogomips with the mouse hourglass icon spinning after you click [Cancel] 5. How to reboot when the mouse hourglass icon is still there after 45 minutes.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Microsoft Cray supercomputers... Wait!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster ... of BSOD's, glowing in the shadows.
On the other hand, I'd rather not.
Hm, could that be the (non-O).S. in Darth and the Emperor's 'meditation eggs' ? That would explain why they spend so much time there. Probably trying to recover the files on immortality from the last heuristic sync crash^W^H 8-lane pile-up.
Burton Smith was co-founder of Tera Computer Company not Cray Inc. He could help MS in improving their thread architecture as well.
Burton has done some very interesting things in HPC, but I very much doubt that this move will have any practical effect on Cray. Burton's interests seem to have diverged from Cray's recently, and, anyhow, the real mind behind their recent architectural innovations is Steve Scott, their CTO and Chief Architect for the Cray X1 series. It will be interesting to see if Burton continues work on the "Chapel" parallel computing language he has been championing... maybe it will show up in the next Visual Studio. =)
BTW, Burton is only a "co-founder" of Cray in a technical sense. He was a co-founder of Tera, which bought Cray from SGI after SGI bought out Cray.
and computing power. Before I get on a rant about the megahertz myth and why I love PowerPC's, the real reason Crays were powerful was their massive parallelism and the use of path optimization (premeasured cables and careful curcuit designs that made the distance electrons had to travel equal between parts of the machine) was the real reason they were a Cray.
c omputing
Just because your machine is *faster* doesn't mean it's anywhere near as powerful! How many CPU cores does your machine have? I bet the cray had more. Clockspeed means *nothing*. The reason those applications don't exist is because they would take an order of magnitude as long to calculate on your "old computer".
I recommend you do some reading on supercomputing-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super
"Supercomputers traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times--in fact, much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy design and componentry. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing."
I'm a signature virus. Copy me to your signature so I can replicate, and introduce your own mutations so I can evolve.
...wouldn't you just love to spend Bill's seemingly ulimited resources to fund your pet project?
The guy is in the business of developing the biggest/fastest/floppiest computers he can. Having the deep-as-the-Pacific pockets of Microsoft to dig into can't hurt his chances of implementing all his pie-in-the-sky ideas.
Smart move if you ask me.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
The Cray XD1 uses Opteron processors and runs a variant of SUSE Linux, but uses a custom interconnect. The Cray XT3 uses Opterons and runs Linux on service nodes, and the Catamount lightweight OS on compute nodes. The Cray X1 series has proprietary CPUs, interconnect, and OS. So you're only partly right. Cray does not hesitate to use Linux where it is appropriate. However, when you are doing something like designing your own vector processor from scratch, porting Linux to it just doesn't make sense.
Linux has certainly proven itself to be a winner in lots of HPC computing applications, and Microsoft has a tough uphill battle to fight if they want to break into this market.
You do seem to be implying that Linux-based computers running commodity hardware always makes more sense than using things like proprietary interconnects. It can certainly be more cost effective, but if performance is your main goal (this is "high performance computing" after all), custom-designed hardware like the interconnect on the XT3 is always going to smoke the off-the-shelf stuff which does not exclusively target the high end.
Smith: "One more thing" is that the uniprocessor has pretty well run out of steam. Parallelism to date has been a nice strategy for HPC users and an afterthought for microprocessor vendors. Now, it is becoming a matter of business survival for all processor vendors. Parallelism is going to be taken more seriously, starting with the idea of exploiting multi-threading and multiple cores on a single problem. This is a major change. Imagine if Microsoft wanted to write Office in a parallel language. What would that language be, and what would be the architecture to support it? We don't have good answers to these questions yet'
...the other shoe drops.
Imagine if you got paid to answer that question? Which, by the way comes out as 'parallel' and 'parallel language' (don't mix them up)
"Burton joins Microsoft as a technical fellow."
Was this article submitted by Bertie Wooster?
No doubt, good news!
This man will doubtless be an asset to them in quite a few capacities...
(Especially as the voice of experience in the CCS (clustering edition of Windows Server 2003) area)
After all: Clustering's the last place for MS to completely CRUSH & DOMINATE the "Pro-Linux Penguins" in ultimately is the niche arena of "Super-Computing"/clustering offerings, & to scale as well.
(Nothing's undoable for MS, they just hire on the best talent & give them unlimited research funding & equipment, so expect this to happen imo)!
APK
I know they've got a problem to work on, and all, but isn't it a bit much for MS to be bring'n this guy in so soon, just because new xboxen are crashin' & being a turkey and all...?
Due to Burton's non-compete agreement with Cray, for his first year as a Microsoft Fellow, he's going to read Cryptonomicon over the company intercom and fix broken chairs in the CEO's office.
I remember that microsoft was complaining, because of the conflict of interests, about a former employee joining google. Assuming Cray computers is still in business (last that I knew, they were) wouldn't that potentially be a conflict of interest with the shareholders of Cray?
Burton, [huh, hew] You are my son! [huh, hew] Come to the Dark Side my son! [huh, hew] (Bill Gates during the Interview with Burton Smith) (Comming soon, Bill Gates in "The Matrix") NoMorePoints.com
What an oddly old-fashioned way to say he's a tech guy.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Not being a troll, but why Google couldn't allure him to join their team. I would say it is Google's loss.
Sorry couldn't leave it...
Quote: "and they will still claim it has lower TCO then Linux!"
"then" is time based comparison. "than" is a subject based comparison.
So the proper usage is:
"and they will still claim it has lower TCO than Linux!"
So how's the Kool-aid?
Don't know what he is going to do for them. Have a friend that used to work for them and the new CRAY up here in Seattle is working on clustered super computers running Linux. Don't think that's going to translate.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
...to help develop a supercomputer version of the BSOD.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Some people have acted as if Burton Smith is the second coming of Seymour Cray. To be blunt, I just don't see it. The MTA was Smith's baby, and by most accounts it was a failure. The first version of machine was based on gallium arsenide technology and was very problematic to manufacture; less than 5 were built. Tera bought Cray largely for their CMOS design experience because they wanted to convert the MTA from GaAs to CMOS, but even that wasn't enough to fix its performance problems. While the massive multithreading capability is cute in theory, the MTA architecture simply doesn't have enough memory bandwidth to handle the scientific codes that cause people to spend 7-8 figures on a supercomputer.
It does seem weird that Burton would go to a software company like Microsoft, though. OTOH, Microsoft Research also employs Jim Gray and Gordon Bell...
This is kind of odd. Burton Smith is not really a cluster guy, although he probably knows his way around HPC (High Performance Computing). Cray is not really a cluster company (except for the system they bought from Octiga Bay deal). If you want to read a review of what Bill Gates said at the recent Supercomputing conference, check out Where is the Cluster? at Cluster Monkey.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Truly exciting research and development is in store at Microsoft!.
Sorry, but it did. See, I'm still chuckling oddly to myself.
Reading "good" into a Microsoft ad -- how preposterous!
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Hiring big names is good PR. But what else is this guy gonna do? It's not like Cray has been spectacularly successful. Mostly, they made a name with their quirky special purpose hardware before most college students were even born. How is that a good preparation for doing anything reasonable for Microsoft?
The Devil's first batch of payments is very lucrative...
Then come the details... is it thursday yet?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I would like to see a more user friendly and stable super-computing environment. All the SC I use are remarkably opaque and extremely unstable, including the new Cray XT3. Likely the worst are the Army and DOD computers. Adding to the difficulty of dealing with their esoteric security procedures they insist on running an in house batch scheduler. My research is difficult enough without spending hours debugging scripts.
46 & 2
And if you had 30 sq metres of floorspace, you wouldn't need the liquid nitrogen cooling. You could use blown air.
By the time Windows Cluster System Edition comes out, your spec will be considered on the low side for a PDA.
Pining for the fjords
Now all Cray has to do is sue Microsoft because the guy is bringing over trade secrets.
Did you say, "Windows Cluster"? I've already got several in my data-center. In fact, every dekstop in my network that runs windows can be considered a "Cluster", "Cluster F#%$^" that is.... HA HA HA HA, I SO FUNNY!
Get your Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Here for FREE! - http://fedora.redhat.com
but whatever it is, it will be interesting. Burton Smith is a very bright guy who pioneered multithreading computing first at Denelcor, and then Tera, which bought Cray from SGI and adopted its name. He is the founder of the company which is today called Cray, but the original Cray company was, of course, founded by Seymore Cray.
Burton always reads broadly and thinks broadly. When designing a supercomputer he deals with every issue, from VLSI technology, Architecture, Operating Systems, and Compilers and Applications. He enthusiastically interacts with many experts, in many areas, and attains a very deep understanding of the issues.
Burton, best of luck at Microsoft.
Jon Solworth
1. create a supercomputer ...
2.
3. profit
isn't a founder of CRAY. He's a founder of TERA Computer who aquired CRAY in the late 90's. He's a proponent of their multithreadhed architecture - an architecture which has abysmally failed commercially. Since 1988 they've had only one actual cash sale of their system. What this probably means is that CRAY is returning to it's strength of vector supercomputers, such as the CRAY1, CRAY2, XMP, YMP, J90, SV1 and SV2 or possibly massively parallel systems such as the T3E and T3F.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
There was a scinet at the SC2005 show - all it needs now is a few typos.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft *need* to get into supercomputing.
They've run out of original ideas. They've realised not everyone with opposing patents can be bought or sued into bankrupcy/submission.
They intend to use Vista/Palladium/TPM to use *our* CPU cycles to create a massive global winwulf(tm) cluster.
If 1000 monkeys bashing keys on a typewriter can write shakespeare, they figure 30 million monkeys/lusers/betatesters/suckers/tards typing endless shite into unread blogs can create their next operating system.
I bet the Vista EULA includes the following..
"we reserve the right to use your computer hardware as we wish, including scanning for illegal media or any inventions or ideas we havent stolen or patented"
"anything you create using our software belongs to Micro$oft"
"by the time you read this EULA, your hardware is obsolete and needs upgrading"
These days, a "high speed interconnect" means doing Infiniband better. Many of the exhibits at the SC2005 show were using Linux, OpenIB and Inifiniband, which is a good start - but slow, because Infiniband is generally implemented as a pseudo-bus run on top of PCI or PCI Express. The added layering adds a lot of latency, and it is latency that is killing a lot of high-end applications. That, and the fact that fat-trees saturate so easily, killing performance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Burton Smith and Steve Scott were considered the two most important technical leaders at Cray, and now both of them are gone. Seems like Cray might be a sinking ship...
For the liscense fees.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
WEC (the manufacturing arm of AT&T) joined with Japanese investors to create NEC in exchange for a 54% stake in the company. So while the companies were legally separate, Ma Bell essentially controlled NEC as if it were a Japanese subsidiary of WEC. So while NEC might not be a baby bell in the classical sense, it is certainly to be argued that it was effectively such a company.
It never ceases to amaze me how big Ma Bell was.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Microsoft needs someone or something to get their multiple CPU and clustering architecture working halfway well. They don't seem able to do it themselves. But I predict this effort will fail too.
Amazing. I only found the NEC/Westinghouse connection from its founding, and the various foreign stock-exchange listings. My apologies. It generally amazes me how big some of the Japanese companies really are as well.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Despite SGI's neglect, the Cray name did and does have a lot of name recognition. So when Tera bought SGI's Cray division, they did so not just for the right to restore the Cray name on Cray products, but for the right to put the Cray name on Tera products. It's an exercise in branding. Indeed I suspect that Tera was more interested in buying the Cray brand than the Cray product line — which has never been profitable.
A more extreme case of branding is Atari, which is now the name of a French game software company that has no real connection with Nolan Bushnell's original company.
So what inspired you to use this reference in response to my original post?
;) The mods disagreed, obviously. /Karma whore
Because if you change the topic, repies appear higher in the page if the parent is also high, and the reader can't tell it was a reply to begin with. It's a dirty method of getting higher on the first page. Of course, it's confusing to the parent poster (unless I fess up!).
I'm not trolling, but who doesn't want their own self-important cr@p to appear higher on the page? Of course my opinion is better than anyone else's... It's mine, after all!
Usually companies such as Microsoft promote people to "Fellow" positions after they get credibility and a large informal "sphere of influence" within the company.
It is interesting that Microsoft will bring in someone from the outside here. They must realise they need some thinking that is outside the Microsoft box.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Take one Microsoft hellbent on becoming the only game in town even if they are sued by various governments around the world. Add one supercomputer corporation. Add one easily manipulated United Nations to strike out any metioning of Open-Source Software. Mix in a little Big Brother and voila! You've got yourself the worlds largest seriving of "oh crap."
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
This is like a nuclear physicist quitting Los Alamos and starting work for Hasbro designing a new watergun for next summer.
There may be more money in waterguns.
Yet it bodes ill for the human race when almost all "value" has become "monetary value" and cash has become a substitute for real quality.
But, then again, you never know....It may be a water gun that will really light up people's life.....
... Windows 2003 cluster of those ...
Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
--
George Bush is a Sith Lord?
Since when is Cray on the bleeding edge of anything? Since Seymour Cray ran things. Sorry but the Cray name doesn't have any cachet any more and no one cares. And Cray's technogical guts barely put them in the Top-500 list compared to all the others. So let MS have 'Cray'.
""Time based comparison" is a time comparison and a based comparison" is incorrect as well. When there exists no comma between two adjectives the first adjective describes the second. Therefore, "time based comparison" describes a based comparison (whatever that means) but not both a time and based compairson. A comparison based on both time and based would be "time, based comparison". When two adjectives are used to describe comparison the adjectives should be seperated with a comma. (Three or more adjectives describing comparison would vary based on style and author's implied diction -- e.g., "quick, concise, judgemental comparison"; "quick, concise, and judgemental comparison"; and "quick, concise and judgemental comparison".)
:-D
However, one might even argue that since time infact describes based that although the two phrases "time based" and "time-based" are structurally different (a chained pair of adjectives versus a compound adjective), their implication is the same semantically (as time describes the based of the comparison in the same fashion that time-based does)!
Anyway, I agree that hyphenation is often overlooked. Additionally, your example of proper use was nearly correct: it was only missing the particle a (although semantically unnecessary, I would mark it in a graded essay). Finally, it is common practice to capitalize the first letter in a sentence even when that letter doesn't appear so in the source quoted.
You might have noticed that I've used the logical encapsulation for quotations and not the standard American style (I find this British habit a bit more precise, even if I do retain my American double quotes).
Well, sorry for being pedantic! He started it! I just figured since we were all nitpicking nitpicks that I would get mine in.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Wikipedia suggests to me that he's really the co-founder of the Tera Computer Company, which merged with Cray in 2000.
thousands or millions of cheap computers with intelligent software to manage parallelism
or
1 expensive supercomputer with customized architecture / language...
which is better?
Probably to get injected with nanoprobes.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.