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U.S. Helps Finance New Cray Development
Durinia writes "SGI has announced a few details on their next Cray vector supercomputer. The press release is mostly about them getting government support for the R&D. It does, however, mention that it will be combining the powerful Cray vector processors with SGI's ccNUMA architecture for big-time scalability."
I'm a little amused by people asking for a comparison of the costs of a Cray SV2 compared with a Beowulf. For a certain class of applications, they remain dominant and some groups are willing to pay the extra premium for that niche, regardless of the absolute costs (and don't forget the cooling/storage/manpower multipliers). Much like a train (vector computers) is suited for different terrain than buses (shared-mem) or trucks (SMP), vector computers provide very cost effective REAL computing power, often obtaining 50-60% of peak performance whereas you'd be lucky to see beyond single digits for MMPs (and before I get roasted, I'd qualify that by noting decent compilers and reworking algorithms often overcome initial technical limitations).
:-).
As for the US support of Cray, well, jaded veterns of comp.sys.supercomputer and HPCC practitioners are well aware of the historical situation with federal funding, technical advantages and bang-for-buck comparisons with Fujitsu and NEC vector computers. For people interested in what the Japanese are doing, I believe NEC are planning on introducing a 1 Teraflop machine with the goal of hitting 5 Teraflops for their Whole Earth Simulator project . Some scientists' idea of heaven is a dedicated vector box and for their purpose and types of code, it is a valid desire.
The SV2 is a curious beast, effectively the first stage in the merging of the Origin cc-NUMA memory subsystem and vector chips. You can think of it as a hybrid box allowing various combination of graphics pipes, MIPS/Merced nodes and vector nodes. The gripe of some people is that they are looking for a successor to the top-end T90 and they are impatient. However, developing at the high end is always trickier than people expect (witness Merced) as you need to increase capabilities along a multitude of dimensions (memory latency, I/O subsystem, heat dissipation, networking) rather than relying from the automatic boost from Moore's Law. Unfortunately there are very few applications which demand absolute performance regardless of actual cost.
To paraphrase crass consumerism, if you have to ask about the price, you can't afford it
LL
The way the market has been going recently, it was beginning to look as though US vector supercomputers were dead, and only the Japanese were still advancing them. The T90 was the last major vector machine, but had memory synchronisation problems with more CPUs. The SV1 had some interesting specs, but I don't know of any site which actually installed one - certainly press releases were thin on the ground.
Parallel machines, such as the Cray T3E, IBM SP2+, and to a lesser extent Beowulf clusters just give so many more Gflops/$. But as has been pointed out they are completely unsuited for some problems, for which you simply need all you power concentrated in a small number of CPU's.
My guess is that there is not enough market for a new US vector supercomputer, and the US government are stepping in so not to become dependent on imported hardware. If most SV1 installations are government, it might explain why we've heard so little about them.
BTW, many older supercomputers were single-user machines, which required a front end running a mutli-user operating system to schedule jobs. However all recent machines, including the C90, T90, T3E and I suspect the SV1 and SV2 run their own operating system (they are self hosting). In this case it is UNICOS, a Cray Unix which is gradually being merged with SGI IRIX.