Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Third, the obligatory comment
A thousand BSODs a thousand times faster!
Looking at the new Xbox BSOD, I think they're now going for quality of quantity. So instead of a 1000 normal ones, you get one really good one.
Oh shit, my progra-- Ooooohh pretty....
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.
They were bought by SGI in 1996, then spun off and sold to somebody else, who then renamed themselves Cray once again - so Cray is indeed the supercomputer business. Somewhere along the way their not-so-super computer business was sold off to someone else. And no, it is more than name and reputation, they sell the Cray X1 and had some clustering product coming out, which could be hurt by this departure I guess.
And that's some very interesting logic - if you are not no1, just give up.
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.
With all their cash, they can catch up in a big hurry. Also, with their market position they can bide their time. How long did it take NT/2000/XP to become somewhat respectable?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Microsoft Cray supercomputers... Wait!
Burton Smith was co-founder of Tera Computer Company not Cray Inc. He could help MS in improving their thread architecture as well.
I think that "not so super" product you're referring to was the Sparc-based system, which became the Starfire E10K. SGI/Cray couldn't make money on it, but Sun used it to eat their lunch.
2 0and%20rude/ Evil and Rude corporation, but there are some really bright people in there working on more than Office.
Like the old IBM, Microsoft is now big enough that various pieces are running their own projects, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Windows that seamlessly clusters, where you could just add machines transparently in a manner similar to a Condor flock, would be an interesting competitor. They may be a lumbering, http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html#evil%
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"How long did it take NT/2000/XP to become somewhat respectable?"
I will tell you when it happens .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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?
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.
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.
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?
Google already have clustering on Linux. Why would they need to get help to do it?
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!
/. is good for you.
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?
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
I think the "current" incarnation of Cray started when they were bought by Tera Computing, whose primary contributions to supercomputing are in massivly multi-threaded computing. Not the wimpy hyperthread that intel has - 128 complete sets of registers per processing unit, data/control flow analysing compilers to automate the extraction of threads from a program, and a huge, proprietary flat (no cache) memory architecture to make sure that the processor always has instructions and data to compute with. I remember seeing Tera at the Supercomputing 1999 conference... and they've likely improved since then.
I'd rather be flying
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
128 full sets of registers per processor? Holy fuck, that's wet dream material.
The thought of being able to do context switching between 100+ threads without taking the performance hit of swapping in/out the registers - damn, that's nice.
What's the price of entry on a decently configured one of those?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
1. create a supercomputer ...
2.
3. profit
I'mve not seen the XBox 360 BSoD, but the OS X equivalent fades the screen to grey and displays a translucent box (with rounded corners) in the middle of the screen telling you in four langauges that you should reboot your computer.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
"And that's some very interesting logic - if you are not no1, just give up."
"tell that to Microsoft who will happily throw millions away to just be no1(sic)."
I thought it was to be #2... oops, wrong market. got confused with all the PS2=supercomputer of a few years back.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
You misspelled 'If".
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)
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)
Yes indeed, but since when did double-standards ever trouble Microsoft?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If an infinite number of slashdotters typed on an infinite number of keyboards, would they produce an original article?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
With all their cash, they can catch up in a big hurry. Also, with their market position they can bide their time. How long did it take NT/2000/XP to become somewhat respectable?
Well....... People seriously misunderstand what it would take for Microsoft to take on Cray.
I think it is very informative to read Cray's K-10 SEC forms. The describe in pretty good detail different types of supercomputers. Microsoft (because they are not a vertically integrated computer/software manufacturer) can only really do the MMP (Massively multiparallel) supercomputers well. Indeed, most of the software for MMP supercomputing projects, such as MPI and PVM is available open source (user mode). MMP work well for certain types of tasks, but they break down for others. For other types of tasks, you are better off with a supercomputer based on high-speed interconnects between processing units. These are not like beowulf clusters. For these types of supercomuters, Cray and NEC are pretty much the only game in town. For those with a short memory, NEC is a "baby bell" (an AT&T spin-off).
So if Microsoft can't compete in the high-speed interconnect supercomputing market, what about the MMP? Can their products be competitive?
My answer is "probably not." They have several serious issues to overcome. The first is that Windows licenses are far more expensive than Linux licenses so the cost per node is likely to be higher. Most MMP supercomputers today run either some varient of Linux or UNIX. Linux tends to be run on commodity hardware while UNIX is either run on some control nodes (in some of the Cray MMP offerings), or on big iron where there may still be some performance benefit.
This therefore represents an attempt to take Windows and take on one of Linux's market strongholds. The best they can hope for is to be able to get market access to some of the peripheral units. Even there, I am not sure how successful Microsoft can be. Much of the work there is likely to depend on SFU because most of the supercomputer programmers are going to be more familiar with a POSIX development environment than an Win32 one. There might be a few VMS geezers out there who might find this helpful but in general, I just don't see it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
"For those with a short memory, NEC is a "baby bell" (an AT&T spin-off)."
BZZT! NEC http://www.nec.com/ is Nippon Electric Corporation, an immense japanese conglomerate founded in 1899. You're probably thinking of NCR, which was swallowed, never digested, and subsequently regurgitated by AT&T.
Your third real option is probably Fujitsu or IBM. The issue isn't just the interconnects, as you can buy those from Myricom http://www.myri.com/ or Quadrics.http://www.quadrics.com/ PNNL did this for their monstrous Itanium-2 system. It's also memory bandwidth, disk throughput, and that some jobs really require vector processors.
What Microsoft brings to the table, beyond incompatibility, overhead, and confusion, is really beyond me at the moment. They have a possibility of making an impact on high-throughput systems, but I can't see what they offer high-performance users.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.
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.
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.
They'e not trying to catch up. The latest trend in consumer CPUs is to multicore and hyperthreading, and it looks like that's the way future improvements will go. If Moore's law is to hold true, then parallelism will be part of our desktop computing future.
Burton's (he's from Tera, not Cray btw) background is in multithreaded supercomputers, so the expertise he'll bring to the table is in getting Microsoft apps running efficiently on the desktops we'll have three to five years from now.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.....
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'.
Only if it were a dup.
emt 377 emt 4
""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?
The same ring as what ? Sorry, couldn't resist. Really sorry. No George Bush is not a Sith Lord. He hasn't the wits. He represents the thinking power of the north end of a south-bound camel, but in sub-human form.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Probably to get injected with nanoprobes.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.