Unholy Matrimony? Microsoft and Cray

fetusbear writes with a ZDNet story that says "'Microsoft and Cray are set to unveil on September 16 the Cray CX1, a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008. The pair is expected to tout the new offering as "the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered," with pricing starting at $25,000.' Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."

Comments

What's the frame rate and resolution?

[tjstork]

I mean, come on, this thing's probably gotta play some pretty good games....

Let's see Toms Hardware and Anandtech put one of these babies through their paces!

My question is, how big does your Word document have to be for it to take a second to scroll from the top to the bottom of the document.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[azzy]

But will it run Vista?

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[tjstork]

Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.

Well, I guess if you want to go back to pine for mail, it might be pretty quick.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[Fred_A]

Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.

It would be if you'd upgraded your machine.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[cduffy]

Like the linux kernel developers are any better...every OS maker is greedy about increased CPU power. I first ran Linux in 1995 and it isn't that much faster now.

Given that the Linux kernel is used in embedded systems with a tiny fraction of your desktop's RAM and CPU power, I'd call it pretty darned safe that the kernel isn't your problem. It's gotten somewhat bigger -- which is why 2.2 and 2.4 kernels are still in use in smaller environments -- but on any system with over 100MB of RAM, you're not going to notice.

Now, if you want to complain about application developers taking advantage of hardware resources (inclusive of the GNOME and KDE folks, browser developers, and the like), feel free.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[jannesha]

It would be if you'd upgraded your machine.

...what?! But that would reset his uptime!

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[alexborges]

Good point: mutt, for example, is still the fastest emailreader ive ever seen.

And yeah. Its much faster now than in 98.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[skidv]

I think the new kernels are faster.

My Pentium 600 running slackware with a 2.4.10 kernel is a lot slower than my Pentium 600 running debian 4.0r2 with a 2.6.x kernel.

Re:What's the frame rate and resolution?

[Mad Merlin]

More importantly, newer kernels *feel* faster. In particular the kernel preemption makes an enormous difference as far as perceived speed goes (for a desktop user).

When I upgraded from 2.4.24 to one of the early 2.6 releases I was astounded at how much faster things felt. On a very modest laptop (1.3 GHz Pentium-M, 512M RAM, 30G 5400 RPM hard drive) from a fresh boot I fired up OpenOffice, Konqueror, Eclipse, Firefox (might have still been Mozilla then, I forget) all at the same time, and the desktop was still liquid smooth and completely responsive. Needless to say, a similar task on 2.4 felt much slower, as actually getting the K menu to open again so I could select another program to start out of it took longer.

Newer kernels are actually faster in a lot of cases too, particularly with scalability, but lots of other optimizations have been done as well, as many kernel developers keep a very close eye on performance. Also, GCC has gotten better over time, and likely optimizes the kernel quite a bit better now than it could several years ago.

Antivirus

[tsa]

I bet Symantec Antivirus can get it on its knees.

This thing...

[kidde_valind]

...is not actually a "desktop". It's not even "a" computer. It's a cluster, and Cray could definately do better than this. Especially considering Unisys has built computers (no, not clusters) with a lot of processors a long time, many of them Windows Capable. So... Cray builds a cluster, Microsoft gets some free ad space for HPC Server. Hooray!

Re:This thing...

[Fishbulb]

Yes Cray could do better, but the Cray of today is not the Cray of yesterday.

It's as close to 'in-name-only' as you can get, considering the number of times it's been bought off and fleeced.

Poor Seymour

[LWATCDR]

The man is spinning in his grave!
Just let Cray pass into history.

And yes, here's a couple jokes

[Captain Spam]

Everyone else has probably done the usual "how fast can a Cray show a BSoD?" gags, so all I was left with was:

• "It looks like you're trying to solve complex multidimensional calculus to model atomic explosions! Need some help?"
• "Hi, I'm a Mac." "And I'm a PC. And here's my 30-foot-tall friend, Big Cray, The Destroyer of Worlds. Kill, Big Cray, Kill!"

Re:Non-useless link

[bmajik]

I got a 503: Unavailable. These guys should get a Cray or something to run their webserver on

Re:The Microsoft Tax

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you go to the Cray site and configure a system, it is available with Red Hat Linux for no cost (getting HPC adds $469)

Re:BSOD

[Sponge Bath]

It comes at you so fast, the BSOD is blue shifted to purple.

Re:Too dinosaurs working together.

[flaming-opus]

I disagree, but then again, I work in the HPC industry.
1. Standard computers have already taken over all of those jobs that used to require a supercomputer. There's no more market to loose. HPC is a 6-7 billion dollar market. The TAM is growing slower than the rest of the IT industry, but it's still a large niche market.

2. Clusters got really popular for a few years, but have really fallen out of favor at the high end of the HPC market. That said, the difference between a high-end super, and a cluster, is rather small. Thankfully the price difference is shrinking too. Moreover, this product IS a cluster. It looks like an attempt, by Cray, to get into the low end of the HPC market. Cray, like everyone else, would like to be the company taking market share away from itself, rather than let someone else take it.

3. IBM has a compelling strategy of reusing their high-end POWER-X processor super-servers, and selling them as supercomputers. The problem with this, is that they are obscenely expensive as supercomputers. A high-end database server has a whole pile of functionality that is completely unnecessary for HPC jobs, both in hardware, and in software. Big iron servers are also WAY more expensive, per-processor, than a super. As such, IBM is also making supers out of commodity clusers, commodity clusters with CELL coprocessors, and BlueGene, which is much closer to CrayXT than it is to an IBM mainframe or superserver. I would argue that IBM's diversity may work against it, in the HPC market, as it tries to fit a round peg into a square hole.

I'm not sure Cray will be very successful with this CX1 product, or generally, selling to the low-end HPC market. That, however, is not reason to believe that there is no need for venders specialized in HPC systems. Cray has made quite a comeback, in the last few years. The reason one thinks of Cray as a dinosaur, is that the HPC market is so much smaller now, relative to the entire IT industry, compared to the 1980s. Nonetheless, it's still an important niche.

Re:BSOD

[outriding9800]

They have gone to Plaid!

Re:!supercomputer

[jedidiah]

A supercomputer turns all tasks into IO bound problems.

A mainframe turns all tasks into a CPU bound problem.

A microcomputer just runs awhile and crashes.