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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."
Burton Smith responsible for architecture of the Tera MTA series and, much earlier, the Denelcor HEP -- both of which were ahead of their times technically but complete failures commercially. (Indeed, Tera Computer had significant financial problems and some corporate governance issues in the years leading up to the Cray purchase. I don't know the financials of Cray today, however.)
Some thoughts, in no particular order:
* The MTA and the HEP, together with Multiflow, represent the commercial roots of the multithreading (MT) work still going on in academia today. Note, however, that the "real" MT work is different by an order of magnitude from what we see in the threaded commericial chips emerging now from Intel, etc.
* The rumor as of a year or so ago was that Burton and a few of the Tera old guard had been pretty much sidelined from the larger Cray operation into unfunded R&D projects being pitched to organizations like ARPA, etc. It would be nice to believe that someone in the commercial arena is going to fund traditional MT ideals, but I'm skpetical.
* What is Microsft doing hiring him? Is this a largely PR move, to improve their HPC image? I have a hard time believing Microsoft is going to spend any money doing parallel architecture work; the list of companies that have tried and failed is long and impressive. Supercomputing today is either custom stuff, or high-end-but-nonetheless-stock hardware running Linux clusters. What's their angle?
* Back in the day, Tera had one of the hottest compilers on the planet; indeed, their compiler IP was pretty much the only valuable stuff left from the MTA project. [Ditto for Multiflow, whose compiler served as the base for Intel's compiler, way back when.] It would be interesting to see who else from the original Tera team follows him over to Redmond -- compiler folk? Architecture folk? Surely not hardware folk?
* If Microsoft wanted Burton, did Google make a play for him too? Now that would have been interesting -- one could have a fun time speculating about masive parallelism and large-grained work tasks across Google's distributed network...
[disclaimer: I briefly worked at Tera in the late 90's.]
Well, the Cray-2 was released in 1985, so it only just barely qualifies for the OP's criteria, since it would not have instantly been in widespread use. The X-MP Was released in 1982, so it is probably a fairly good guide to what would have been a "common" supercomputer at the start of 1985.
Before the XMP/EA's came around, the XMP had a max memory capacity of 128 MB (stated at the time as 16 Megawords, as byte notation was not yet universal.) 4 Processors, and a theoretical peak of 200 MFLOPS per processor. Thus, about 800 MFLOPS theoretical aggregate peak.
I just looked up a few numbers real quick... Looks like a dual-proc, dual-core Opteron 270HE has a theoretical peak of over 17 GFLOPS. I'm not intimately familiar with the memory latency characteristics of a cray, but I really can't imagine there being much competition between the two, no matter how great the IO was in 1985.
Obviously, quad-core Opterons are fairly high end... dividing out, and a single core from the system I was looking at the numbers for would be about 4 GFLOPS. Of course, that's peak. Probably something like 2 GFLOPS easily sustained for a modern single desktop CPU. Any AthlonX2 should be able to run the old nuclear sim code quite a lot faster than the "average" cray at the start of 1985. Regardless of any verbal mis-steps, or name calling in this thread, I think the original point was well made. I'd love to get to play around with some of the old sim software. Let's break out the g77, bitches! Let's get a nuclear sim project on sourceforge. It'd be greatly educational, both from a retrocomputing perspective, and from a physics one.