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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."

17 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. In other news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft also announced Windows Vista will require a Cray supercomputer to run.

  2. Crazy? by HugePedlar · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  3. Re:Irresistable by RenHoek · · Score: 4, Funny

    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....

  4. Great News by Essef · · Score: 4, Funny

    Windows Cluster Edition System Requirements:

        - 128 CPUs
        - 100 GB RAM
        - 30 square metres of floorspace
        - Liquid Nitrogen cooling system ... and they will still claim it has lower TCO then Linux!

    --
    Don't read between the lines, the real interesting stuff
    is below the line you just read.

  5. Gone to the Microsoft Side... by Red+Samurai · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

    1. Re:Gone to the Microsoft Side... by kesuki · · Score: 4, Funny

      So now the race is on, who can build skynet first? google? microsoft? or linux users?

      I think humanities last best hope is that it's microsoft.. humanity is saved by a BSOD (or perhaps by a gaping security hole that allows users to set terminators to target skynet)... of course google will never take skynet out of beta, and linux users would make skynet overly complicated, and abandon the project half way to completion.. when the lead developer gets a real job.

      --
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  6. Clarification of "co-founder" by Durinia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Clarification of "co-founder" by mpg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.]

  7. Under training... by Skiron · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. 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.
    1. Re:There's a difference between megahertz... by fingusernames · · Score: 4, Informative

      Back when I worked at Cray, one project I worked on was the Fortran 90 compiler. The Fortran 90 compiler was developed on Sun SPARC machines and it cross-compiled to the Cray. Crays, even the mighty C-90 back then, weren't that great interactively, and were pretty slow to compile code. Not to mention the fact that Cray CPU time was far more valuable than the Sun machine's. Pre SGI/Tera Cray machines came in two flavors, the original vector processors (C-90 up to 16 or 32 processors?), and the later massively parallel T3 series (with HUNDREDS of DEC Alpha processors). Both were specialized machines which excel at particular tasks. Wickedly fast at those tasks.

      Too many people these days work only on PC architectures, and have no/little exposure to other, superior architectures. The PC was and is designed as a cheap, mass produced general purpose desktop device. It in no way compares to supercomputers, mainframes, or true server architectures. A computing environment is more than the sum of the raw megahertz and bandwidth claims of its disparate parts.

      Larry

    2. Re:There's a difference between megahertz... by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  9. 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.
  10. Not exactly right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. A golden age of Fellows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    The new supercomputing fellow position will be a great complement to Microsoft's existing technology fellowships:
    • Menu drop shadow fellow
    • Tail-recursive Windows-Update/reboot dependency cycle fellow
    • Cartoon balloon notification fellow
    • CD-ROM executable file autorun fellow
    • Animated dog search technology fellow
    • Cool full screen color effect fade fellow
    • File replacement/deletion semantics fellow
    • Marketshare defensive game theory fellow

    Truly exciting research and development is in store at Microsoft!.

  12. I don't know what Burton will do at Microsoft.... by computerDr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  13. Burton Smith... by eXtro · · Score: 4, Informative

    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