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Cray Wins $52 Million Supercomputer Contract
The Interfacer writes "Cray and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named 'Hood.'"
Hood is within specs for Vista. A big relief for Cray since they weren't sure it'd meet memmory specs for Vista.
52 million dollars over a couple of years.... Not much to keep a high-end computer company running on.
Boy am I glad that Bush has destroyed socialism.
--
make install -not war
Oh, wow! Does it run Virtual Machines?
That the DOE isn't hoodwinked by using such an energy consuming device to research energy consumption.
are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so, Brain! NERSC! POIT!
Because of it's power requirements, Cray's only possible customer was the Department of Energy
Luxo Jr. with true ray tracing?
Cray finally figured it out. I have been saying for years: HPC/Beowulf clusters are about building machines around problems
That is why Clusters are such a powerful paradigm. If your problem needs more processors/memory/bandwidth/data access, you can design a cluster to fit your problem and only buy what your need. In the past you had to buy a large supercomputer with lots of engineering you did not need. Designing clusters is an art, but the payoff is very good price-to-performance. A good article on this topic is the Cluster Urban Legends, which explains many of these issues.
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Overheard at Microsoft:
Boss1: Cray has developed a computer that actually runs Vista fast
Boss2: I see, let's remove that "optimization" box from the gantt chart then..
Boss1: But customers will compain that they can't afford to buy a supercomputer
Boss2: What? it runs AMD! how can it be expensive....those morons
It's named "Hood"? What are they going to calculate, protein folding in ice cream? ;)
I thought SGI owns Cray now? Wouldn't that mean that they made a deal with SGI?
Even so- I doubt 52 million is enough to save SGI in the long haul- especially if anything more than a few percent goes to actual hardware/research costs (and it will).
That about says it all...
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-237517.html
Even I didn't notice that happen. Apparently Tera bought Cray from SGI and changed the name back for recognition purposes.
Can you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these bad boys? >:)
Thinking outside my Head
the Cray brand making a comeback in the super-computer area. I can remember fondly the days of my engineer CS days longing looking at those Cray supercomputers (was that a couch around it?!? COOL!) in awe and just wondering what they could possibly be computing with 512M of RAM and a 2G super-cooled processor. SUPER COOLED!
...reality bit.
Then it was back to my PDP-11
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
...to be programmin' n da hood.
Current State: Pirates > Cowboys + Ninjas + Robots Yarrrr
I don't have any concept of scale when it comes to price for these things. Is this a big contract as far as supercomputing contracts go? The biggest? Average?
Will this thing be cooled with that cool nonconductive liquid goo stuff that it all just bathes in?
H. P. Hood is a beloved ages old dairy company that started outside Boston.
They had giant milk bottle ice cream stands, one stood outside the old Computer Museum on Congress St.
No slight intended concerning ethnic neighborhoods.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
What's under the hood?
Back in the day, one of the selling points of the soon to be released Cray 3 was that it was so fast, it could do an infinite loop in only 4 days! How have things progressed since '91:: Does an infinite loop only take a day or few hours now?
Does anyone know who else bid on this contract? Was BlueGene a contender?
...
It would be interesting to know the other bids and their performance
See reply to first reply for confession of karma-whoring troll
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
...systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million
Ummm... no offense to Cray, but that's pretty f*ing lame.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need to 'encourage' our kids to desire scientific jobs.
Is isn't even a stack machine! (http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/08/10/1649 213.shtml) Pffffft...
Yes! Yes! I confess! Can I be burned at the karma stake now?
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Unfortunately this seems to be one of the topics that the slashdot bias and ignorance comes out in full force on.
* Clusters can not compete with supercomputers. They aren't even in the same market space. Cray doesn't make clusters, and clusters have not taken away their business.
* Cray doesn't take off the shelf hardware and sell it as fancy clusters. Actually look into the details of these machines. While processors sometimes are off the shelf much of the surrounding hardware and software is custom.
* This 50 million contract is one of many that cray has. They also just recently in the news got a 200 million dollar contract. They also are a contender in the DARPA HPCS thing. That could be a lot more if they get it. They aren't dieing.
* They aren't owned by SGI any longer. They were bought from SGI by Tera who renamed themselves cray.
* The top500 list is nonsense. It is based off of 1 benchmark (linpack.) That benchmark doesn't stress the interconnect too much and can allow clusters to appear to compete with supercomputers if you manage to ignore all the other factors. The number of teraflops has very little to do with performance. To see a more well rounded and thought out measurement of top systems check out HPCC's website. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/hpcc_results.cgi
* Bluegene doesn't kick Cray's ass. See the above and then see how it really performs overall. In some areas it does better and in others it just gets destroyed. Depending on the real world problem a full size blue gene may not even be able to perform as well as a much smaller Cray.
If you don't know what you are talking about look it up before posting. Just because it's the common belief doesn't mean there is any truth to it!
The Hood supercomputer at NERSC will consist of over 19,000 AMD Opteron 2.6-gigahertz processor cores...
The Ultimate Gaming Machine!!!
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Real name "SkyNet"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ... oh wait!
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I wonder how powerfull the hood ornament will be.
Holy cow, I didn't even know Cray was still in business! And, does it run Linux?
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Will it be promptly sunk by the a German supercomputer named Bismark?
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
And to be honest, a research question like that is probably even a better defined one than just looking at the protein folding problem in general, and therefore not a bad way at all to spend your research money!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Wow..imagine a /Beowulf cluster/ of those virtual machines...
um - nevermind.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"The system uses thousands of AMD Opteron processors" I will create a new Supercomputer using the new Intel chips and call it the Bismark
America would be better served if we sink the money in creating interoperability standards and creates ways to increase competition in the computational industries. Every company from Microsoft, to Apple to Parametric Techologies to SDRC to Oracle to ANSYS to itsy-bitsy-prof-and-grad-student-garage startups work to build vendor lock-in into every one of their products. The market creates rich rewards for locking in the user to one software product and preventing the user from migrating to a more efficient competitor.
Promote interop and competition. Super computers will become dime a dozen.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Harry! Harry! Where do you go when the lights go out?
I garauntee it will have 15 viruses 10 gb of spyware and will have to restart every 14 seconds. ATLEAST IT WILL BE FAST AND BROKEN INA COUPLE OF YEARS!!!
From the all mighty MissioN of Mass.
The XT3 is not really a cluster. True, it's a message passing machine with an interconnect between commodity processors, but that interconnect is very highly integrated into the system design, and the software stack is very customized. The line around what is, and is not, a cluster is a fuzzy line, but this is not a cluster in the language of government supercomputer procurement where 'cluster' means 'commodity cluster'.
Nersc, and a number of other dod/doe labs are buying a new generation of "true" supercomputers (XT3, bluegene, P570/VIVA, altix, X1) as a response to the perception that commodity clusters have largely failed in delivering real performance. While performance on real (not-linpack) applications has been a problem for commodity clusters, the real problem has been reliability. A machine that gives you 10 teraflops of performance, but is down for maintenence half the time, is less useful than a much smaller machine that actually runs. While the fundamental architecture of a commodity cluster does not preclude reliable real-world performance, many of the clusters actually in use, have not provided very compelling real performance for the real world cost of owning the systems.
Nersc has owned commodity clusters, as well as large mpp machines from IBM and Cray, including the XT3's predecessor the T3E. They know what they're getting into.
We wouldn't know every machine Cray shipped to NSA, and the exact specs, but we would generally know. Indirect evidence abounds.
In fact, it was widely reported in the HPTC press that the defense department was helping to fund the development of the "Black Widow" vector supercomputer, and that they funded much of the development costs for the X1. If you search the web for a while, you'll find that the NSA is the only customer for cray's bizzare MTA3 supercomputer. Every once in a while you'll see cray press releases about sales of X1's to "undisclosed" or "government" customers.
Without Uncle sam's checkbook, cray would certaintly go under. I bet the US government accounts for 1/3 of their sales, and another big chunk from foreign governments, and military contractors like boeing. That said, it may not be a bad investment on the government's part. Keeping Cray alive means that IBM has some competition, and it keeps the innovation going at both companies, and keeps down the sticker price on the high-end IBM and HP systems. Subsidizing cray is not cheap, but it may be cheaper than not subsidizing cray.
So when taking someone to the computer-housing complex, could a nerdy white guy finally be able to legitimatelly say: 'Welcome to the 'Hood' ?
This is actually related to this story that ran on Slashdot a month ago. Turns out the Inquirer article that everyone ripped to shreds for being light on details was right all along. (I saw sanitized excerpts from e-mails regarding the incident, so I can tell you that Intel's Woodcrest chips performed abysmally in the DOE's testing compared to the Opterons.) The competitor that lost was IBM and the reason was because of problems with Woodcrest. The supercomputer in question will be running on 24,000 quad core Opterons. I will leave it up to the rest of you to draw your own conclusions from this.
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
Yes, in fact it does.
You are correct to argue that using a LINPACK-based benchmark for a molecular dynamics problem is foolish.
However, the arena of molecular dynamics is one in which clusters and MPP in general are easily the better choice than a monolithic supercomputer. On the one hand, you can make each node an automaton to describe a single particle in a very object-orientated fashion. On the other hand, you can make each node representative of a spatial cell whereby the boundaries interact with those of its nearest-neighbour nodes. It is particularly in this second scenario where the MPP approach wins hands down (and scalably so).
So, just because the benchmark is biased (which it clearly is), do not assume that this means that it undervalues one architecture or the other for solving an entirely different problem.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
It's an homage to Hood College
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers