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SGI Negotiating Cray Research Sale
Aviast writes "SGI is in talks with the Gores Technology Group to sell
the Cray Research unit of SGI. Read the [Yahoo News] story
here.
SGI bought Cray three-and-a-half years ago for $700 million. According
to this story Gores originally offered $100 million for Cray, but
has since lowered its offer." Rumors about this have been floating around for weeks. Looks like they *may* become reality, but the deal is apparently still a long way from done.
Perhaps Cray computers are not as valuable now that we have beowulf & other clustering technology which can give you the same amount of raw processing (with alittle extra latency) as the big iron?
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It sounds to me like SGI bought it, cut off a chunk of it for money, and will promptly sell it away. Granted, they were competitors and everything, this doesn't sound like good sportsmanship to me. Then again, I've stopped being impressed since they changed their logo :).
-S
They got the technology they needed out of Cray... Pass on the carcass! :)
Would this mean we'd be getting lots of *nix suppotr for future Cray supercomputers?
Now why on earth would SGI sell a company like Cray for less than what it costs to buy one of Cray's boxes? :)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I read an interesting article this morning on SGI and it's future. Heck, it may even be this article that in my rush to beat the floods of AC's out I've decided to temporarily postpone reading to jot this down. Anyways, this article talked about how for the longest time, Cray held this niche in the market that noone could penetrate. 'Cray' was synonamous(sp?) with 'SuperComputer'. Then something terrible happened: BEOWULF. (Yes, yes, I know.. make all the cracks that you like, but this story just SCREAMS Beowulf threads.) They said all kinds of neat-o things like how it has become easy for companys that want huge processing power to get it at a fraction of the price through massively powerful parallel computers. A thousand P3's are most likely still cheaper than a Cray.
One interesting thing that stuck in my mind was how the CEO, you know, what's-his-name, said that the advantage of Cray Machines was in the architecture.
This would keep the mean old Beowulf at bay.
He was talking about how in the PCs under (or above, doesn't really matter) our desks, the processor is powerful and the pipe is small which limits the amount of data that can be pushed through. Crays are fast with huge pipes, making them perfect for big data-crunching applications (like simulating wind sheer in a Cumulonimbus Thunderstorm in real-time).
Now, how long will it be before the architecture (finally) in our PCs changes to something that will be more along the lines of this system? 10 years? more? less? Who knows.
Man, I rambled alot. I know that I had a point somewhere in there.
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rJames.org - illustration
C'mon, really, who expected this not to happen when SGI picked up Cray awhile back? Long gone are Cray's glory days, where it was whispered on the lips of computer geeks who swore theyd own one when they grew up.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I find it kinda sad that Cray has gone down this far. I remember way back when wheels were square, Crays were the fastest computers on the planet. On the other hand, it's pretty cool for the Open Source movement that Beowulf clusters are taking off and actually being ~very~ competitive in the super computer market. This might even help me sell Linux to my boss. I for one would love to setup a cluster to run our intranet on...
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Just the cray name must be worth more than 100M $.
Any company selling high performance computer systems would benefit from having the name "Cray" on their boxes.
Rumor that I've heard is that the sale is pretty imminent. SGI wants to get rid of Cray, as long as the offer is half-reasonable.
SGI buying Cray was one of the dumbest things they did to get where they are now. After pummeling them through '95 with the R8K, they bought the name. Despite the talk, Craylink and all the other Cray names that SGI started pasting on products weren't invented at Cray. They were good old Silicon Valley technologies, invented by engineers who got pissed off and left when the Cray name was signed over their work.
this is proof positive on how SGI is dying and they need to shed the unprofitable, unmanageable solutions before they go all Linux and resurect themselves.
Cray is boring these days. Unicos/Cray are no match for a beowulf cluster and in most cases a quad xeon running Linux will smoke a Cray anyhow.
The only salvation for SGI is linux. We know they are dumping all MIPS/IRIX machines by mid next year and replacing them with better performing, cheaper Linux/Intel boxes. IRIX/MIPS cannot compete with Linux in performance, security or SMP scalability and Linux is tearing up the 3D market.
It was only natural that Cray get dumped sooner than later. Linux just wins.
Please contact the Chinese government. They will pay double in cash. Ok people, start your China bashing. It's a Slashdot reader recreation or what?
This isn't really a rumor- SGI has been pretty vocal about their desire to get rid of Cray. Contrary to what some other posters have said, Beowulf didn't kill Cray; Cray was losing money long before Beowulf had any commercial applicability. SGI never got the technological or administrative synergies that it expected out of the transaction, and while it's great to have a high profile name like Cray, SGI can't afford to keep them anymore. And yes, their (Cray's) market value has gone way down- they were bought for $600 million and they'll probably be sold for under $100 million, which SGI would be happy to get.
Everything SGI touches turns to garbage: MIPS/CRAY whatever...
Anyone notice that they are now touching Linux????
Anyone scared yet????
Traditional SGI: promise great tech like OpenVault, XFS, CXFS, Open DMF, Samba (anyone tried to download something beyond 1.9 from their web site), then drag drag drag drag your feet until no one cares a rats behind......
An accounting: Other than a few kernel patches (which any geek worth their salt could claim) and a cheap but Origin 200 to the samba guys, SGI has delivered nothing of value to the Linux community.
True story:
When cubicle SGI purchased office Cray they went around and RIPPED the doors off every Cray office.
Now hows that for maturity?????
So much fun watching the fall, why bother putting up blocks at all....
Actually, if anything, it's linux that will kill
them. I doubt they'll make any money off this
new age PC market. But then again, who needs
SGI? Linux only brings another segment of the
"daddy can I have a new computer" market to
power. They'll never buy SGI's anyway.
--------------------------------------
slashdot: you still have the wrong logo.
The number of customers for the largest computers manuafactered, $10+ million, has been shrinking with the defense industry. Also many people meet their needs with high end workstation- more powerful than the pre-SGI Crays.
Am i mistaken, or has not SGI sold part of Cray Research (the high-speed crossbar part) to Sun some time ago ?
;-)
AFAIK a bit later Sun came out with the E10000 which incidently had a high-performance Crossbar architechture....
But SGI had a much better Idea: Windows NT...
(we all know the Desaster for SGI...
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Jor
This will no doubt result in more layoffs from SGI's engineering team. We remember how they laid off 3000 engineers in April. Now is a bad time to be in anything but e-commerce. SGI's e-commerce strategy is definitely to get rid of everything else. That's the method of operation in Silicon Valley: if it doesn't work don't fix it. Get rid of it.
Show me what drugs you were smoking?
As a dyed in the wool Linux user/developer, I haven't seen too many machines which can outperform the 108 node R10K Cray we have in one of our buildings here (yes there are some Beowulf clusters out there, but they can't keep up in the memory bandwidth area). And remember that Linux-on-Intel is terribly limited by the architecture of the bus, etc.
This kind of FUD is not helping...
Mind you, if SGI are flogging Cray off cheap, I'm offering $10! That's right, I'll offer a whole $10 to buy Cray from SGI, no questions asked. And I bet I could make it profitable =and= bleeding-edge, too. All I ask is the chance for SGI to prove me wrong! :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
With all the news coming from SGI, it doesn't look like they will be going anywhere in the future.
Even if the software eventually gets ported to Linux in the future, I bet it will have to be repurchased and this might be a real obstacle especially for academic institutions since it is rather expensive.
________________________________
If encryption is outlawed, only
________________________________
If encryption is outlawed, only
YIE565$FF DSDNE4!MJK XMY7*fRBVM.
I have asked them bastards for the IDO or IDF CD for Irix 5.3, but they don't listen. Before all you morons start telling me I don't need the IDO/IDF CD to use gcc on IRIX 5.3 you need to realize that you are wrong. I'm not going to quit giving SGI a bad rap until they give me what I ask for. If anyone out there knows of an ftp server or such that has the IDO or IDF on them I'd really appreciate it. I'd even mirror it so other people don't have to go through this ridiculous shit.
SGI... dumb and worthless just like their new logo.
It never seemed like Silicon Graphics had a solid financial or technological interest in Cray when they bought the company. The two products don't pair well together, the supercomputing and workstation technologies are totally different, and Cray had been floundering around for years. The computing trend of the time was toward the desktop, and Cray was the opposite.
Now that they're simply SGI, it hasn't taken quite as long to figure that out. We need Cray, but we need one that can turn a profit in the private sector.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Ummm... you are joking aren't you..
Linux has been well known for it's sucking at SMP. All Beowulf is really doing is clustering of CPU's. All you really are doing is throwing stuff out onto the EXTREMELY slow network medium, to get any real performance benefits you have to rewrite your apps so they stay local to your memory, do minimal IPC, etc. Lots of software does clustering not just Linux, hell even NT does clustering.
Quad xeon smoking a Cray??? are you sure you haven't been smoking? Seriously look again at what you said, damn you are funny... Go check out top500.org and see how many Linux boxes there are compared to Cray's and then go and check the number of CPU to Performance, nothing more need be said.
For SGI dumping Irix checkout http://www.sgi.com/developers/index.html#irix for the next year they are spending more on development and have more developers working on Irix then Linux
Security... well how about this one Irix and Solaris are the only B2 classified OS's out there. Irix had some "EXTREMELY" stupid things in it a couple of years ago, of course I remember lots of VERY stupid things Linux dist had in them and many more of them over the years.
Scalability... Irix sacles to 1024 proc SMP box using Numa, what does intel do currently... 32 (I think) that's about 32 times smaller than a O2k; and if that's not enough, you can add Beowulf type clustering on top of that if you wish, so you could have 10 1024 proc boxes with superfast IPC speed in each box and then add the slow clustering network on top of that.
Linux may be starting to tear up the 3D gaming market, but they haven't started into the heavy-duty 3D market yet... NT, Irix, Solaris are seriously dominating this market, until some of the big-time software is ported to Linux that's the way it will probably stay (Maya, Softimage, etc.).
We had a bunch of Sun reps at our university come tout their products a month ago. One guy stated that when SGI bought Cray, Sun bought the one part of Cray that was still making money. They bought a group that was producing this crossbar architecture using Sparc chips.
The architecture is different from the 3000/4000/etc line to the 10000 line.
Apparently the new upcoming 10000s are super sweet. More than 64 procs (128+?) The starfire (10000) also has some nice advantages, like dynamically allocating processors to multiple "virtual" machines running in one single box...
anyway, the Sun rep backs up your statement.
--ed
OK...Script Kiddies and Fellow Logicians... Here's the Griff... The US Government is the biggest user of Crays by far. Imagine the scenario. Cray is handed down at devalued loss from SGI to, say, a shell company owned by the Iraqi government. Wow, that's an interesting scenario and perhaps an idea for a new book by Danielle Steele or one of those trash novelists... More likely than your amateur prophets-of-doom sootsaying is that SGI will place Cray into a separate division which will be financially supported by its main customer for as long as they need. Thus the Feds will subsidise a commercially non-viable system because it is of strategic value. Buzz Lightyear. tourist@verio.com
I remember when SGI did their previous idiotic move of dumping the old, recognized, cool logo for the new one. One of the big reasons they gave for the change in logo and in company name (S.G.I. to SGI) was that they weren't just in the graphics business anymore -- afterall, they also owned Cray.
And now they're selling Cray for less than the cost of one of Cray's machines? So... the whole "identity change" exercise was pointless?
Who is it over at SGI that is in charge of aiming the gun they're using to shoot themselves in the foot?
You are right, but you're also wrong. I agree that Linux SMP sucks --at least the 2.2 series. But a Quad Xeon III can offer equivalent performance (~40%) of a Cray T3D anyday, at an order of magnitude less $$$. The 12 Xeon III cluster I sysadmin can go head to head with a T3 easily, over Base 100 Ethernet! (we just got Gigabit Ethernet --give us a week ;-).
;-)...
At the low end, a compact Beowulf can easily compete with a Cray. Most scientific codes these days use MPI anyways, which can be ported easily from UNICOS or Irix to Linux. At the high end, or for specialized applications, we have ways to go. But, with better SMP support, and better support for fast networking (SCI, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel) Linux is getting there, fast. I wouldn't put money into SGI --except maybe to short them
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
> if SGI are flogging Cray off cheap, I'm offering $10!
And I bet you'd be buying a bloody big debt with your $10. SGI wouldn't be selling if they were making money with Cray.
Regards, Ralph.
In my opinion, in order to put this into perspective, you need to look at the history of the subject at hand.
The first types of supercomputers were faster and better than typical computers because of the design and features put into them. They used faster components which were custom-built (and thus a lot more expensive) and had features like vector units which made them attractive to scientific applications (but again, more expensive). Then, people started to think about how they could make supercomputers at the same or faster performance but bring the cost of producing them down. Rather than using expensive custom-built processors that had to be submerged in cooling fluid or using vector units to manipulate large arrays in a single operation, they started to develop new designs for supercomputers. One new type of machine was SMP based systems such as the Cray PowerChallenge type of machine. In this machine, many processors share a common memory, just like in your 2-way or 4-way desktop boxes now. With these types of machines, the lack of vector units isn't such a big deal since you can instead just separate your array into N different portions (where N = the number of processors) and apply your vector operation in parallel over the processors in the system. The problem with these types of computers is that scaling up to large numbers of processors is difficult since contention for the system bus (to talk between the CPU and memory or I/O) gets complicated with the larger number of processors. Another new type of machine were Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) machines such as the Cray T3D and T3E. In these types of machines, many processors (~1024) are interconnected with a very fast network. Each processor has its own individual memory, so the system can be scaled up to much greater numbers of processors. The problem is that now instead of having a single common shared memory, you have all these distributed memories and you have to use message passing techniques to get your data distributed around, which is a pain. So, this led researchers such as John Hennessy (at Stanford) to come up with a new architecture that uses Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). To the applications programmer, things appear to be a large shared memory (although if you touch certain parts of memory, access times are slower than touching other locations in memory -- since they have to be fetched from a remote machine). In fact what actually happens is that each processor still has its own local memory, but a processor on a very fast interconnect card coupled with each processor examines memory references and if it sees you are using memory that is not local to your processor, fetches the desired section of memory from the remote processor. So, it's sort of an MPP type system but appears to the programmer as sort of an SMP type system. This is what SGI/Cray sells as the Origin 2000. It's still cheaper to produce than traditional vector machines which use custom CPU's and memories (since it uses more commodity CPU's and components), but at the same time offers good relative performance.
Now, in the late 80's, Seymour Cray decided that building supercomputers out of commodity components wasn't the right way to go. His opinion was that, all things being equal, you could always make a faster supercomputer if you used more expensive components and designed your supercomputer with that goal in mind (i.e., use SRAM for all memories, use the fastest technology in your CPU, etc.). To that end, he created a company called Cray Computers which was separate from Cray Research (i.e., Seymour was in charge of Cray Computers and had nothing to do with Cray Research). Cray Research produced the computers such as the PowerChallenge and T3E while Cray Computer continued to make expensive vector-type computers. Unfortunately what ended up happening was that Cray Computers folded because their machines were so expensive and the performance gain you got from them did not justify the greater cost. (Really, the only places that bought these types of computers were "spook sites" like the NSA, to the best of my knowledge.)
The pervading idea is that this trend towards computers that offer decent performance while costing significantly less will continue. This is the idea behind clusters such as the Beowulf or, more importantly, clusters like the NT Supercluster at NCSA. The NT Supercluster differs from a Beowulf in that it uses a more costly network adapter (specifically, a Myrinet adapter from Myricom) to allow internode communication to take place at higher bandwidths and lower latencies than a standard Ethernet. No, the performance of these types of machines is nowhere near what you get from a machine like the Origin 2000, but the idea is that you get comparable performance at a huge reduction in cost. Additionally, because the components used to construct these clusters are commodity components, everybody will be producing these components and continuing to improve their performance. So, the speed of cluster-based computing relative to machines like the Origin improves over time. [Disclaimer: I am one of the people who helped develop the technology in the NT Supercluster, so I have some bias.]
To say that SGI ruined Cray is no more true than to say that they ruined MIPS. The reason that people are not that interested in MIPS processors any more is that Intel processors are a commodity now. Everybody uses them, so the overall industry trend is to make Intel and Intel-related technologies faster and better since everybody works together in a sort of de facto way. Yes, probably the MIPS design is a much better processor design than the Intel design (it wouldn't be difficult), but the key thing is that everybody in industry is using Intel. This is the same reason that building supercomputers out of commodity components (i.e., clusters) will probably be the way things work in the future.
Want to know why SGI can't give you the IDO, they LICENSED PARTS OF THE TECHNOLOGY FROM OTHER COMPANIES, i.e. some other company than SGI gets money for each compiler they sell. If I licensed tech to SGI and got a nice chunk of change for each license they sell, do you think I'd say sure, give it away for free, I don't care about me making money, I care about SGI making money. On the SGI Linux mailing list people have mentioned about opening up parts of the source code, well the problem they run into is that years ago, they licensed tech from other companies and the other companies (ATT for instance) haven't let them open up their tech. I'd bet the cost that they'd sell 6.5 to you ($600) is less than what is costs them in Licensing for IDO (If I remember right 5 years ago it was something like $3k).
l for the binutils (ar, etc.) and linker. Use the header files from a Linux dist and if everything works well you should be off to the races. (as I said before 5.3 is so dead that it's turned into oil along with the dinosaurs, so I've not been able to validate this myself)
I'm open to debate, and I'd actually be really interested in an actuall GOOD reason for them to dogged, especially when their hands are tied due to licensing, etc.
Another point, SGI wants 5.3 dead, it's NOT Y2k compliant and they are NOT supporting it anymore. I don't blame them at all since 6.2 came out 4+ years ago (it's like complaining about a company not having a 386 bios Y2k compliant, get over it), what version of Linux was out then, NT 4 wasn't even out yet (I remember playing with beta at the time). If you want old hardware to run, start supporting the Linux Mips project, or pay the $600 for Irix 6.5 or checkout below.
Have you tried get gcc running on 5.3 by using headers from Linux?.. check out Ariel Faigon's website at SGI for instance http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware/ for GCC, goto http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/sgi/gcc-irix.htm
Here's a very nice Cray FAQ! All you ever wanted to know about 'em.
Perhaps the cray citadel at Egan was not assaulted (why goodforsaken egan as a supercomputer mecca?), but the outlying provinces sure suffered at the hands of SGI.
I've personally observed the loss of doors at the Calverton MD facility and was told SGI was to blame.
Also, if you ever sign up and take an SGI course in IRIX and get an instructor from Cray, ask for a refund immediately. I lost track of the times the cray instructor, teaching an SGI class said the phrase "Well I don't know Irix, but in Unicos...", unexcusable for a class in Irix sysadmin.
EOF
Ummm... I'd upgrade to a new Cray, the last one I see installed was installed years ago, the cray.com website doesn't list that model anymore. I don't doubt your Xeon cluster gets 40% of a T3D, but I bet that 3D would kick your 486's butt if we compare apples to apples, or maybe T3E's to Xeon's :) Of course a person could probably make an app that would smoke a T3D on a 486 with a proper (totaly legit) program... i.e. running vi on a 486 might actually be faster since it wouldn't have to worry about context switching, etc.... the same way people complain about an Onyx being dog slow compared to their Pentium box running quake.
The biggest beef with Intel (other than shoddy manufacturing) they can't push data around fast enough, we put in SGI O2k's for the sole purpose of being able to push files around fast enough (6 FC controllers out to lots of EMC storage), we don't do anything CPU intensive, get a file push it out, but we have to have that much CPU power to drive all of the IO; I have get to see an Intel box be able to do that.
The biggest problem I see with Beowulf is that it doesn't do very well in the large memory department, NNuma is the way to go here, if I have to access memory on a node 12 hops away it takes a lot more time than going directly to it, as you mention FC, GB, etc. puts a bandaid on top of it for awhile but isn't a very elegant solution to the problem as a whole.
I wouldn't put much money in SGI at this time either, but time will only tell what shakes out. This is a very turbulent time for the industry, the only one that is really profiting is SUN, and really only because they are eating into old SGI, HP, DEC, etc. customers how long they will continue can only be guessed at.
Maybe if you had read the site you just gave me you would have seen:
3.If you are only running IRIX 5.3 and you don't have the IDO, you can not get a working GCC compiler since IRIX 5.3 is missing all the standard header files (such as stdio.h). One person reported getting GCC working under IRIX 5.3 but I don't have any details. You might be able to get GCC working under 5.3 by using the header files from one of the free versions of unix such as Linux or BSD but I have no way to test this.
I'm honestly not willing to fuck around and try some hacks to get it to work since it should work from a fresh install of 5.3. SGI loses I guess. I am now FORCED to pirate their software since they will not provide it to me. I am going to be contacting numerous people who I think may have it at their place of employment. Sorry, this is the way it HAS to be, I will not bend. The software (IDO) will then be made available since SGI has failed to do so. I'm sick of bitching about it and I'm sick of fucking hearing about it. I'm going to give SGI one last chance here in the next 20 minutes... I'm going to call them and tell them what I will do if they don't provide it to me. If they don't break down I will do as I say. This is a true crock of shit. Fuck you SGI.
I work in 3D field and this is a blatant lie. Linux is used by a very small percentage of people. Makes me wonder about the rest of your post.
You know, that could have been a T3E --I am not the one running the benchmarks ;-)... It sounds like your applications are much more I/O intensive than the stuff I am used to (computational fluid dynamics).
;-)...
In our applications, a Linux-powered Xeon III-based Beowulf can compete with (slightly older) O2Ks *at the same number of CPUs*. Again, YMMV: as you say, the pipes in these SGIs are much, much fatter/faster than anything we can throw in on a Beowulf.
But the important thing, IMHO, is that the price/performance ratios of Beowulfs are now enabling a new class of applications, with *dedicated* hardware built to fit the software requirements rather than the other way around.
With the amount of money and man-hours being thrown into Beowulf enabling technologies (fast networking, maintenance schemes, HA, process migration, etc., etc.) I think we're approaching a shift along the lines of the old workstation/mainframe schism: cheap dedicated machines (Beowulfs now, workstations back then) versus very expensive, generic heavy iron (supercomputers now, mainframes back then). In the end, the largest mindshare (number of applications/developers) and the better price/performance ratio will win.
I am siding with the 'wulfs
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
That seems to be your unstated conclusion.
Boy what a bleak future you paint!
Might as well go shoot myself in the head, as there will never be anything new to see, and all the songs have already been sung.
This is sad. As I sincerely believe that biodiversity is important, I also believe that technodiversity is important.
The future you paint offers no competition, no evolution, no excitement.
Sigh.....
the list of CHARMM serial ports is at:t ml# Machines
http://www.lobos.nih.gov/Charmm/c27n2/install.h
...I can't seem to get a space included in hyperlink here on slashdot
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
One of the few references that I can find on the web is here in a 1990 paper.
Basically, this handwriting has been on the wall for well over a decade, and one can only hope that SGI recouped their investment in the first few years after purchasing Cray.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
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In my experience, Cray MPP systems are worth every penny of their performance. I'm doing research on Beowulf clusters right now, and I'm finding that no matter how many processors you add to it, no matter what magic you weave with the networking, its not going to match the performance of a Cray T3E.
Crays will continue to have a market, where people need to run LARGE applications (we do a hell of a lot of seismic data processing... hundreds of gigabytes of data are going through our T3E-900) at high speed. Beowulfs will have their market too, where people need to run large applications at a lower speed for a lower cost.
In my opinion, the Cray/SGI merger should never have happened. Hopefully, the company that looks to be buying Cray won't drive it into the shitter (they had bought Thinking Machines when they went under... look where they are now), and they'll get back into the market. Dust off and update the plans for the T3F, maybe introduce a lower-cost MPP system to bridge the gap between Beowulfs and the T3E.
At any rate, we're not getting rid of our Crays for a long, long time. :)
Please note, I am not speaking for the company I work for in any capacity whatsoever, I'm not even going to name them. If you want to buy supercomputing time, however, do drop an email...
I'll just pirate it and 6.5. Fuck 'em.
Here I am again, bitching about SGI. I just can't stop.
Maybe if they didn't price gouge people for every little thing like the ability to use free software (yes, that's right, they make you pay to use free software...not a joke.) they would be turning a decent profit. Oh well, who needs fuckheads like this that shit on the community anyways? I'm glad they're doing poorly and I hope it's soon that they vanish for good.
Therefore I'm going to tell the truth about them everytime the SGI topic comes up. They're price gougers.
The T3D has been end of life'd - get a T3E. Also, how many processors were in that T3D? I seriously doubt you're going to compete with a T3E, however. It's hard to argue with 2048 DEC Alphas at 600 MHz...
Also, let's talk about memory bandwidth. I believe that the present T3E model gets 45 gigabits/second *BETWEEN* processors. I'd like to see you get that to local memory in your Beowulf cluster. Does that make a difference? Yes. In raw CPU speed, your Beowulf cluster may win. But that doesn't matter if your CPU's are idle half the time waiting for the RAM. Some of our (Cray's - well, technically I work for SGI but I wish I worked on the Cray side of the split - at least I still have access to their machine room :) customers will buy Beowulf. The biggest ones won't. The reason is that poor memory bandwidth could double your run time. While that makes hardly any difference for a 5 minute benchmark, for a 2 week MPI job, that could be a bit of a letdown if it now takes a month.
The other thing is NUMA - a Beowulf cluster is not a NUMA environment - you can't DMA from one node into another node without kernel intervention. On the T3E (and the SMP based vector Crays) you can do this. On the Origin (SGI designed) ccNUMA boxes, you can actually allocate several hundred gigabytes of RAM into a pthreads job and access it all normally. You won't be doing this on Beowulf any time soon.
Now, most of that doesn't make a difference for lower end customers. However, Cray has never targeted the low end of anything :) Check out the Top 500. There are a lot of Crays. There aren't too many Beowulf clusters.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Aaarrgh, I had a long reply ready to submit and then Netscape/Slashdot froze on me.
.sig line for quite a while thereafter (which is how the quote got so much exposure). I also seem to remember that at the time Eugene Brooks was mainly refering to how microprocessor based workstations like SUN Sparcs and HP PAs were going to eat the lunch of Minis and Mainframes (using more discrete components) from IBM, Digital and others. I remember seing the performance range curves for the different computer classes and how the KM curve was increasing a lot faster than the mini and mainframe curves and would eventually overtake them.
Anyways, yes, I used to read comp.arch quite a bit back then and I seem to remember that's where Eugene Brooks first made that post. I seem to remember Henry Spencer used it as his
I remember seeing those same curves a few years later to show how the gap left at the low end by the KMs opened the doors for the portable/wearable computers such as pen tablets. As the user interface issues with wearable computers get resolved, their widespread adoption will increase and they too will become commodities (the Palm Pilot is the tip of the iceberg). It will take longer for the wearables (let's call them tracys after Dick Tracy watches) to overtake the KMs since the KMs can take advantage of fixed data transmission mediums. You'll always be able to put more data through fiber than through air. However when you can put an Origin2000 equivalent on a watch (using molecular circuits, Drexlerian rod logic, quantum gates or whatever) the KMs will
be pushed back to a small niche indeed.
No one will survive the Attack of the Killer Tracys.
Of course by then, the computers are small enough that you can get them as cranial implants with spinal and optic nerve taps, however the upgrades are a real pain. Worse yet, everybody's always worrying about whether the generated heat or the coils for receiving the power from the external battery cause brain cancer. After all, if a new vision correction treatment doesn't work, you can always get your eyes cloned and replaced. However, nobody wants to take a chance on getting their brains fried, you can't replace that!
"Duh, my brain hurts."
"Oh, we'll just have to get it removed."
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire