Cray SV1 Named Best Supercomputer for 2001

zoombat writes "The BBC reported that the Cray SV1 product line won the Readers' Choice Award for Best Supercomputer for 2001 by the readers of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine. These beasts have some pretty remarkable stats, including a 300 Mhz CPU clock, up to 192 4.8 GFLOPS CPUs or 1229 1.2 GFLOPS CPUs, and up to a terabyte of memory. And they sure know how to paint 'em real nice. Of course, we all know how "scientific" the Readers' Choice Awards are..."

Nostalgia Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember how in the game Populous (I forget which platform, maybe SNES) there was a computer tileset and instead of castles, the highest level of structure was a Cray? Anyone happen to know the model (if you could tell from the graphic)

"best", but not most sexy...

[green pizza]

Most sexy belongs to the Thinking Machines CM-5 "Blinking Machines":

(Nice big CM5)
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Imag es/CM5_lg.jpg [uiuc.edu]


Makes the SGI Origins (see below) look like freakshows:

(128 CPU Origin 2000)
http://gepard.cyf-kr.edu.pl/GRIZZLY/or2.jpg [cyf-kr.edu.pl]

(A cluster of [many] 128 CPU O2K's)
http://www.ccic.gov/pubs/blue00/local_images/blue_ mountain.jpg [ccic.gov]

(A 256 CPU O3K, a 16 CPU O2K, and some RAIDs)
http://www.cines.fr/images/IRISetMINERVE2.jpg [cines.fr]

Re:Beowulf?

[ScumBiker]

There's a 50ish lady that works at Cray, named Dorothy. I met her at this years Rockfest, in Cadott, WI., which is about 20mi north of Chippewa Falls. She was wearing a Cray tshirt, which of course caught my eye right away. I ended up making friends with her and getting a phone number and contect person for Cray to get my very own Cray tshirt. We talked about how SGI is sucking the life out of everything around it and I found out Cray is back out on it's own. So, it appears that Cray is going to survive SGI after all, and will still be building those insanely fast machines they're known for.

CPU speed is not relevant anymore!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact is that even in ordinary PCs the processor speed is no longer a problem. The real bottle-neck is the I/O of both the memory and the mass storage.

This has been common knowledge in the world of supercomputing for decades. In a multiprocessor architecture the speed of an individual processor is not that important. What's important is that the processors can efficiently access the memory, mass storage and can rapidly communicate with the other processors.

If I were buying a new computer now I'd opt for a dual processor setup (possibly two 650 MHz P-III CPUs or something else in the same MHz range) over a single, blazingly fast CPU that chokes on the sluggish memory bus.

500 Fastest Computers In The World

[robbyjo]

Visit here [top500.org] to view 500 fastest computers in the world as of June 2001. Cray is actually number 11. IBM ASCI White SP Power 3 is the king.

It's interesting to note that a beowulf cluster is also there (#42)

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Beowulf clustering is a decent solution for calculations that involve easily parallelizable tasks (ie. sub-tasks that do not need to communicate with each other).

If, however, the sub-tasks have to communicate with each other the bandwidth becomes critical and clustering over a network won't scale anymore.

Cray represents another approach to the problem. It has an absolutely amazing bandwidth and can deal with the hard problems that can't be parallelized over a network.

So, clustering Crays wouldn't help you at all.