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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.
Because of it's power requirements, Cray's only possible customer was the Department of Energy
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.
Join Tor today!
It's named "Hood"? What are they going to calculate, protein folding in ice cream? ;)
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.
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.
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."
are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so, Brain, but how do we get that many processors into a pair of rubber pants?
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!
I was talking about this just a few days ago, wondering if maybe cray had been doing work it simply couldn't talk about for uncle sam, it would explain their ability to stay alive. If a company like cray works on a super computer for say the NSA would we know? Maybe through FOIA, but I have no idea.
I work in the industry. 'Course it's easy for an AC to say that, isn't it?
$52M is rather large nowadays. At least, for a 'commodity' part cluster it is. For a 'vector' supercomputer, it may be only medium sized.
You can easily break the top 50 for less than $10M. A couple thousand nodes, each with two dual-core Opteron/Xenons, InfiniBand or Myrinet (maybe 10GigE), and a compiler that optimizes better than gcc... no problem.
That being said, NERSC is a pathologically tough customer. Cray will have to work very hard to earn each and every penny they get. It may very well be a 'live or die' deal for Cray.
Nope, the NSA's budget is almost entirely black (covert). In fact one senator quipped after the NSA headquarters building was built that they spent x billion and had no clue on what.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I would imagine that IBM probably did bid. They would be crazy not to for $52M.
But....... "the Hood system installed at NERSC will be among the world's fastest general-purpose systems".
Nersc are looking for general purpose computing systems to fill the needs of 2500 users. Blue gene is blindingly fast at some things, but general purpose it aint. I've benchmarked both the XT3 and Blue Gene with a set of general Scientific Codes and the opteron delivers much better general price/performance for a representative set of tasks. Blue gene will fly if you have the time to get REALLY low level in your optimisation but most scientists don't have the time or knowledge to start dealing with that ind of thing.
Hmmmmmm