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Cray Co-Founder Joins Microsoft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the switching-horses dept.

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."

2 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. There's a difference between megahertz... by RodgerTheGreat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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/Superc omputing

    "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.
  2. Well, if you were given the chance... by Dread_ed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.