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Hardware IT

Cray XD1 Now Available 200

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-small-country-that-has-everything dept.
cyngus writes "Cray announced the availability of their XD1 systems. Each XD1 chassis has up to 12 AMD Operton processors. Up to 12 chassis can be clustered together in a rack. The XD1 uses Cray RapidArray Interconnect technology, based on HyperTransport, for high bandwidth and low latency communications between processors and chassises. The XD1 also has a handful of other technologies aimed at the HPC market, including Xilinx FPGAs, communications accelerators, etc."
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Cray XD1 Now Available More

Cray XD1 Now Available

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  • Not the top end (Score:5, Funny)

    by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) * <oculus.habent@gma i l . c om> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:53AM (#10439423) Journal
    It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.

    Still, if they need someone to, uh, test one...

    • Re:Not the top end (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LoudMusic ( 199347 )
      It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.

      Still, if they need someone to, uh, test one...

      Interesting numbers. Also to note, NEC's Earth Simulator is now nearly three years old - the Cray XD1 is made with modern AMDs.

      I guess there's no getting around it. For the time being our really fast computers will just be fucking huge. Oh, and call NEC if you want a big computer. (:

      • Re:Not the top end (Score:5, Insightful)

        by visgoth ( 613861 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @01:38PM (#10441805)
        I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge. If engineers could somehow magically fit the total power of the Earth Simulator into a single 1u chassis, people would still cluster a few hundred of them together. There's no such thing as enough processing power, as people always find a way to utilize it.

        (commence snide comments about the next windows release... now :) )

        • I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge ...


          snip

          commence snide comments about the next windows release... now :)


          I for one welcome our new fucking-huge-windows overlords. :-P

        • I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge. If engineers could somehow magically fit the total power of the Earth Simulator into a single 1u chassis, people would still cluster a few hundred of them together. There's no such thing as enough processing power, as people always find a way to utilize it.

          Hmmm ... good point. Sometimes I slip into "Apple Mind" and forget that technology has progressed and think that my workstation is a super computer (referance to the G4 'your own personal [macdesktops.com]

    • the difference (Score:5, Informative)

      by bmajik ( 96670 ) <matt@mattevans.org> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:12AM (#10439699) Homepage Journal
      the nec SX architecture uses these ridiculously huge custom vector processors to get performance (similar to the Cray 1, 2, XMP, YMP, etc design)

      this Cray is more like building MPPs off of scalar units (opterons) and doing some real innovation around the MPP interconnect. It's sort of off the shelf, yet not at the same time.

      The big thing here that kicks ass is the 6 FPGAs per chassis. If you can write a highly tuned software algorithm, there's a chance you can write a highly tuned peice of hardware, deploy that to the FPGA, and you've got an application specific hardware accelerator. 6 per chassis, infact. That's pretty cool, and its in some ways a HUGE innovation over having a dedicated vector unit (as was the cray1 design).

      the really interesting thing here is that these are essentially opterons running linux, with custom interconnect goo. The interconnect bypasses the PCI bus - its closer to the PE's than that.. their claim is that it attaches to the AMD hypertransport bus (the Proc -> Proc -> Mem bus for SMP AMD machines)

      • Hell, yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DarkMan ( 32280 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:27AM (#10439863) Journal
        For my apps, I do iterative matrix calculations. However, one of the required data tables scales as n^2.3 (ish) of the system size. These can be precalculated, or calculated on demand. Typical size for a small run is 4-6 GB. I've filled a 40 GB array with data tables before.

        Thus, the part that impacts runtimes the most is either the on disc lookup, which is still faster than direct calculation, which we've also had to do.

        I looked into FPGA's a while back. Some back of envelope calculations show that a single FPGA should be able to calculated the data table on demand, and it'll be faster than reading from disc.

        (Turns out, that to actually get a usable solution for a basic PC would need to hack up the whole tool chain. FPGA cards for a PC are all designed for DSP, rather than numerics).

        So, with an FPGA and a CPU, I could elminated the slowest part of the job, and scale up to, what, a 1GB working matrix, which is about 8 time larger than the biggest job I've ever run, which hogged a T3E1200 for 6 hours.

        So, in short, gimme an FPGA and some reasonable tool chain, and I will be able to about half runtimes, and, more importantly, scale up to 10 times larger calculations. 5 time larger calculations is the most I've ever been asked about.

        Time to brush up on my VHDL, I think.
      • Last I heard, Cray and AMD had made a custom Infiniband-Hypertransport bridge for this system.

        It would be nice if it were available on low-cost motherboards so anyone could build a similar system.
    • It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.

      Earth Simulator uses vector processors. If you want a comparable Cray system, you should be looking at the X1 which is also a vector processor. Incidentally, the X1's silicon runs so hot they use evaporative florinert cooling instead of a straight liquid - the florinert is heated to just under the evaporation point and sprayed onto the processor so that the phase change will remove more heat

  • long time no news... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:53AM (#10439430) Journal
    Since they had been bought by SGI, I've actually been wondering whether they would make me dream again.

    • Re:long time no news... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cyngus ( 753668 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:58AM (#10439515)
      SGI does not own CRAY. They did buy them back in 1996. SGI sold its Cray unit in 2000 to Tera Computer.

      • right.. but what happened to Tera?! (Score:4, Informative)

        by bmajik ( 96670 ) <matt@mattevans.org> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:28AM (#10439877) Homepage Journal
        i was looking at cray.com and there's no mention of the Tera MTA. The Tera MTA was the innovative idea they had to have 128 logical threads on a single CPU.. think of hyperthreading but with 128 logical threads instead of.. 2.. and also it was working at least 8 years ago.

        If you look at cray.com today its pretty sad. 3 product lines - the TD1 opteron+magic, the X1, which is traditional cray vector (smp vector nodes, and MPP's of those nodes), and their 3rd product line is the NEC SX-6... they're reselling it in the states for NEC.

        If you hit tera.com, you get a 404 :/

        • Whither MTA? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Troy Baer ( 1395 )
          Look under initiatives on the Cray products page; the MTA-2 is shown there.

          The MTA idea is neat, but nobody's ever been able to find a problem that runs all that well on them. The original MTA didn't have enough memory bandwidth to make it competitve with a vector machine, and the small number of them in the field (less than 10 IIRC) are notoriously cantankerous. When Tera bought Cray, the one of the main things they were buying, aside from name recognition, was Cray's CMOS design experience; they were

        • Tera's MTA isn't exactly like HyperThreading. HyperThreading looks at (currently two) threads and sees which instructions from each stream it can schedule each clock. MTA was more like round-robin scheduling of threads on a per-clock basis. At each clock N, it scheduled an instruction from thread N, on clock N+1, it scheduled an instruction from thread N+1. In other words, if your process had only one thread, and the MTA processor ran at 1GHz and had 128 "threads", then your process ran as if it were on
          • Well, partially. The scheduling did still have some severe benefits. Most importantly was for memory bandwidth. One of the threads can do a fetch, and the scheduler continues onward executing other instructions. As long as you can guarantee that a fetch doesn't take longer than 128 clock cycles, you've lost nothing. Which also means you can put a highly latent, extremely high bandwidth memory bus on there and reasonably expect to get 99.9% utilization of it. Combine that with some specialized instruct
    • I think this is evidence that they are headed in the right direction. Rather than completely custom hardware all the way down to the processors, they've positioned themselves more competitively by using the CPU design power of a major business and consumer supplier as well as applying their own special design talents to other hardware areas that are not served by the business/consumer vendors.

      I too was worried that Cray would completely disappear if they continued to pursue the expensive and anachronistic
    • Didn't Sun buy the best part of Cray, hence the E10k, or am I utterly wrong? (Again.)

      • Re:long time no news... (Score:2, Informative)

        by soyle ( 196995 )

        Didn't Sun buy the best part of Cray, hence the E10k, or am I utterly wrong?

        I forget where I snipped this from, but here goes:

        The E10000 is a Celerity product. Celerity was an independent Unix box maker back in the 80's with their own processor architecture. Celerity went bust trying to bring a "minisupercomputer" version of the architecture to market in about 1987 (33 MHz, whoo hoo!). The assets and technology of Celerity along with the design team in San Diego were acquired by Floating Point Systems

  • Maybe! Linux runs on the MicroBlaze softCPU on Xilinx FPGAs [uq.edu.au], as a derivitave of uCLinux. Care to port it to this new hot hardware?
    • Being based on Opteron, any x86 software will run on it. Maybe without all the bells and whistles though. But Openmosix can solve most of those problems.

    • Having Linux or any other OS (or even CPU type functions) on the FPGA would be a waste of gates. The gates would be better spent for specialized vector operations, such as an FFT or crypto engine.

      • Not when you want to run existing Linux apps on those gates, without rewriting them (which would be a waste of programmer time, much more valuable). And running Linux apps on those gates is a first step in porting them to native FPGA netlists. This is the way to leverage existing apps to increase the utility of FPGAs, by running useful apps on them, and optimizing to native parallel execution. That way we don't waste either gates OR programmer time, not to mention every other resource in the chain.

  • Sheesh...what happened to Cray? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ferkelparade ( 415620 ) <svenNO@SPAMlrdg.de> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:00AM (#10439531) Homepage
    A Cray is not a true Cray unless it can be used as a stylish sofa [ed-thelen.org] :p

  • Operton? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:00AM (#10439535)
    So, is the Operton more or less powerful than the Opteron?

    Also, mandatory: imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

  • Does the XD1 give the illusion of shared memory? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:02AM (#10439566)
    I've heard conflicting reports on this - reading Cray's own literature, you see them say:

    "Tightly coupled to the AMD Opterons and switching fabric, [the RapidArray Communications Processors] handle memory to memory copies, global memory management, and system wide process synchronization, freeing..."

    (Emphasis mine)

    Does this mean the HT links give the OS the view of a single-system for each chassis? (Or rack, even?) Ie, can I utilize a single processor out of those 12 in a chassis, and access 96GB of RAM with that one process WITHOUT using MPI or rDMA?

  • Cray doesn't do Clusters? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Edward Ka-Spel ( 779129 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:03AM (#10439580)
    I thought Cray was trying to convince the world that Clusters were not as good as true supercomputers, but this looks like a glorified cluster. In looking under the hood it appears to be just a collection of 2-way SMP Opterons with a superfast proprietary network backbone.

    And it's running Linux, if that matters to you

    • Re:Cray doesn't do Clusters? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:08AM (#10439652)
      This is nothing compared to the 1024-way massively parallel computers Cray has built in the past. That's why they don't like clusters - to them, a cluster is an inferior solution in the light of massively parallel systems and, on the other end, vector supercomputers. What can you do with a cluster that you can't with one of these?

      Given the financial status of Cray, embracing clusters is just a common sense move, not necessarily an ideological one.
      • And I believe the answer customers respond with is: Save lots, and lots of money. R&D, Purchase, and Maintenance.

        In the world of buisness, ideology often needs to take a back seat to good common sense. Personally, I feel it's to their credit. This way they can focus less on their last innovation, and more on the next one.

        ~D
      • They still make vector-based supercomputers, massively parallel systems, clusters, etc. These are designed to appeal to different markets.

        If you read Cray's 10-K, you will see that they believe that some computer problems can be resolved optimally on clusters, but others are better suited for vector-based systems.
      • What can you do with a cluster that you can't with one of these?

        Spend a few million on something else.
    • You're right. The comment regarding clusters was 'Would you use two strong shire horses to plough a field, or 1000 rats?'.
      • I suppose it depends on how well you can control the rats and how much you pay them.

        Seriously though, I some problems are well solved with clusters and some with vector processors. So I suppose Cray is trying to find out just how many fall into each camp... either that or how much their name is worth.

        Just thinking about that, I guess I would buy a mini Cray deskside thing if I had to replace my Onyx 2 but not a cluster as my application doesn't do well with them. Shame really, I like the Blue Gene/L.

    • This is more than your typical cluster with a fast interconnect bolted on. I would rather picture it as something completely different with a glorified cluster bolted on. The true beauty of the system lies not only in the fast interconnect, but also in the 6 FPGAs that are onboard each chassis. The power of a properly implemented algorithm in hardware is a force to be dealt with. This setup by and far is not your typical cluster.
  • Dogbert: So, what does it do?

    Dilbert: I can compute many values of pi. Some people discuss areas of circles, but I'm doing something about it!

  • Interesting specs and density (Score:5, Informative)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:06AM (#10439614)

    From the linked page:

    Highly modular, the Cray XD1 base unit is a chassis. Up to 12 chassis can be installed in a rack. Multirack configurations integrate hundreds of processors into a single system.

    Farther down the same page:

    The Cray XD1 compute subsystem is composed of 12 AMD Opteron(TM) 64-bit processors that run Linux and are organized as six 2-way SMPs to deliver 58 GFLOPs* per chassis. Finely tuned memory and I/O performance removes bottlenecks and maximizes processor performance.

    Wow - do the math: 696 GFLOPs per chassis. That's rather impressive.

    However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s. Yes, I felt the same thing with SGI, DEC, and Sun. Yes, I need to get over it and move on. :-)

    /occasionally misses the Y-MP

    • However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s. Yes, I felt the same thing with SGI, DEC, and Sun. Yes, I need to get over it and move on. :-)

      No need to worry -- if you want a Cray vector processor-based supercomputer, you can still buy one [cray.com]. You can also source the parts for your own Earth Simulator [cray.com] from Cray, as well.

    • However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s.

      Actually, in the year between crash of Cray Computer (in March 1995) and his death in an auto accident, Seymour Cray started a new company, SRC Computers [srccomp.com], which still exists, and makes a parallel Pentium-based computer (which also incorporates custom hardware processing elements). I believe that this product is the same thing he was working on from the start of that company in 1996.

    • From your quote of the article:
      The Cray XD1 compute subsystem is composed of 12 AMD Opteron(TM) 64-bit processors that run Linux and are organized as six 2-way SMPs to deliver 58 GFLOPs* per chassis.

      Your comment:
      Wow - do the math: 696 GFLOPs per chassis. That's rather impressive.

      To get the 696 GFLOPS you need to have 12 chassis (a fully loaded system), so it isn't 696 GFLOPS/chassis, but /system. Sorry, just wanted to point it out.

      • I meant "696 GFLOPs per rack", not "per chassis", where a fully-loaded rack contains 12 chassis (58 * 12 = 696). D'oh! I appreciate the correction.

  • XD1 announced sales (Score:3, Informative)

    by ruiner5000 ( 241452 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:11AM (#10439686) Homepage
    Cray has announced a lot of different sales of the XD1 the past couple of weeks. We have all the details here. [amdzone.com]

  • Where's the source code (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Donny Smith ( 567043 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:13AM (#10439702)
    > Cray HPC-enhanced Linux, Kernel version 2.4.21

    I wonder what that means - Red Hat EL 3.0 with enhancements, or their own thing..

    Interconnect - I wonder how their proprietary interconnect compares to IB..

    File system - ext3? No cluster file system?
    • Actually, as far as I can tell, their interconnect is IB at the hardware level, but without a PCI bus between the HCA and the memory controller. That drops their latency by a couple microseconds, and it means they don't need PCI Express to get full bandwidth out of the network. The claim is that they use their own software stack in place of the VAPI stuff, and that they don't use MVAPICH from Ohio State like most IB sites do. I haven't had a chance to look at our XD1 (we've had 3 chassis' worth for almos
  • Chassisses?

    Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that you're not pronouncing it correctly, either?

  • Still waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)

    by koehn ( 575405 ) * on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:18AM (#10439760)
    I'm still waiting for Cray to ship their pen-based system...

    ... wait for it ...

    Crayola!

  • Coincidence? (Score:5, Funny)

    by JediTrainer ( 314273 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:28AM (#10439880)
    Id releases [slashdot.org] Doom 3 for Linux, Cray announces availability of new supercomputer.

    Dare we say, we've finally actually found the hardware that can run this game?
    • Id did a pretty lame job of porting Doom3 to linux, and hardly any interesting features are present. No alsa, no amd64... doesn't work with radeons.

      I wonder what John has been thinking... a few years ago he was on /. answering questions, pretty into the linux movement. Has he dumped us?

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by glMatrixMode ( 631669 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:30AM (#10439905)
    ... the Gentoo Chief Marketing Officer made the following statement :

    "We welcome the Cray XD1 as the first platform on which Gentoo installs in less than 12 hours. Looking forward to renaming Gentoo to 'One-Click-Linux'. Stay tuned !"
  • Have the NSF buy a few billion dollars worth of high end Opteron hardware and make it availible to those who are doing public research. I think that access to a few million dollars worth of high end hardware would help cut down on the R&D costs for drugs that are partially paid for with taxpayers' dollars. The good side is that if part of the package is free time on really sophisticated NSF clusters capable of really cutting down number crunching time, the public can demand on its end lower prices and/o

  • Hmmm.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dracolytch ( 714699 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:33AM (#10439946) Homepage
    I guess the chickens win after all.

    ~D
  • XD1 would probably be a good emoticon for anyone who manages to get their hands on one of these babies.
    • well then... XD1 to you! We got one at my place of employment a few weeks ago. It is a nice machine. We've been following it since it was an OctigaBay 12k system at SC03. It's basically the same system as it was then I guess, but with the Cray name as far as I can tell. Only a few complaints so far is they could give you a little longer power cord. The thing that comes with it is like 12". Also the case is a bitch to get into... it's like 12 screws, thumb screws would be a plus, something like the IBM p630s

  • Pah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mollymoo ( 202721 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:44AM (#10440103) Journal
    Loads of Opterons? Who cares if GFX card is teh sux? Cray are a bunch of noobs. I bet it doesn't even have neon fans! You'll never get the chix showing them your 1337 skillz in CS with that heap of junk.
  • Quote the marketing info page: "runs wide variety of ISV applications and open source codes"

    That's the power of Cray's parallel processing: each machine runs its own "open source code" therefore a cluster is more powerful because the entire cluster runs "open source codes". At least that's their sales reps understanding of it.

  • If you can't afford this Cray... (Score:3, Informative)

    by IronChefMorimoto ( 691038 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:50AM (#10440170)
    If you can't afford this Cray, you can at least buy the parts to start putting together your own multi-processor Opteron system:

    http://www.monarchcomputer.com/ [monarchcomputer.com]

    A friend of mine and I were talking the other night about local Atlanta, GA computer stores, and he mentioned that Monarch Computer is one of the only vendors from whom you can purchase the 4-way Opteron 800 series processors ($1200 a piece -- damn!).

    He's been in grad school out of state for a few years and was suprised to learn that Monarch Computer is, in fact, in his hometown backyard. Kind of kewl to walk in a store in your own town and walk out with a $1200 4-way processor.

    Until the wife finds out and sends you back to said store with the receipt in hand for a refund. :-\

    IronChefMorimoto

    P.S. - I don't work for these guys or advocate their store. I just thought it was cool to have such a vendor nearby. Too bad they don't sell Shuttle XPCs.

  • It's nice to see Cray out there (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Proteus ( 1926 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:56AM (#10440239) Homepage Journal
    Cray systems may not always be the fastest thing around, but they are solid. It would be nice to see more producers paying careful attention to clean design and reliability over having the latest speed-booster.

    It's nice to see our old friend Cray continue to keep a foot in the market -- if nothing else, it makes everyone else stay on their toes.
  • 12 Opterons deliver 58* GFlops (where * = peak). The Army's recent G5 cluster (1566*2 G5 processors running at 2GHz) deliver 25* TFlops. 58 divided by 12 yields 4.8* GFlops per chip for an Opteron, and 25000 divided by 3132 yields 8* GFlops per chip for the G5. What's wrong with this math? I didn't think the G5 had numbers THAT much better than an Opteron. And with G5s hitting 2.5GHz today the numbers would be much worse (or better, depending on your point of view).
    • Your numbers are right.
      The Opteron's theoretical peak double precision floating point numbers are pretty mediocre, it gets beaten soundly by Xenons and Itaniums too. It's just not what the processor was designed for, it only has one FPU iirc, where the G5 and most of the other competition has 2.

      It is worth noting that these are theoretical numbers, not what you can actually achieve in reality on any given algorithm. The Opteron's Rmax is slightly more competitive(2.9GF/proc at 2Ghz in LosAlamos's Lightni

  • What happened to RedStorm? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by telemonster ( 605238 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @12:16PM (#10440508) Homepage
    Cray not-too-long-ago had major announcements with the RedStorm project. I believe that system is supposed to be a single image 10,000 CPU AMD based rig. There are some oddities friends have pointed out, like the OS is based on IRIX I believe...

    Yea check this out:

    Cray Unicos/mp" [cray.com]

    Actually that references the X1, which is not based on PeeCee stuff, but actually a 8 core MPM.

    Sad thing is, even with Red Storm I think IBM will remain on top as their contract calls for 130,000 of their powerPCs on one system?

    It would be nice to see Cray on top, with something other than a commoditiy processors. I realize the T3D and T3E were both Alpha based systems.

    PS, I still have a J932se 32 proc Vector Cray ( for sale [ebay.com] ) if anyone wants a Cray for home. $4500, real deal 3 cabinet Cray from 97', most likely used for gov't nuclear energy something-or-other. Located in Southeastern Virginia.

    • Q404 (Score:2)

      by kcm ( 138443 )
      Sandia contracted out Red Storm development, hence RS is based on Sandia technologies towards petascale computing: Puma, Catamount, Portals, etc. No UNICOS, no IRIX, no Linux (except on the service nodes).

      This is a quintessential kernel architecture without support for threads, VM, IPC, etc. The interconnect is also asynchronous (5ns end-end speculated), point-to-point, and uses Portals.
    • It's still on-going. Red Storm is the focus of cray's effort over the next couple of years. Red Storm is the real-deal MPP-style system with a micro-kernel OS. xd1 is a low-end mini-super they acquired to expand down-market. (like mercedes buying chrystler)

      2 complimentary product lines. You could run the same application on both, though red storm provides real shared memory, which might allow better optimizations.

  • I love Cray (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Superfreaker ( 581067 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @12:50PM (#10441088) Homepage Journal
    After searching everywhere for the legendary "Wang Computer" tshirt, I decided to fall abck on teh second geekiest computer company to get a shirt from, Cray. I couldn't find a shirt through the normal outlets (eBay/ThinkGeek), so I called them directly. The woman that answered was glad to help and shipped out, not a tshirt, but a very nice collared shirt that makes it look like I work for Cray! I wer it to all the conventions and I become cool(er).

    *queue calls to Cray*
    • a very nice collared shirt that makes it look like I work for Cray! I wer it to all the conventions and I become cool(er).

      /me sings "No woman, no Cray..." ;)

    • Re:I love Cray (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fingusernames ( 695699 )
      Cray was always big on the memorabilia. I worked there as an intern for two years in the mid-90s. I still have many t-shirts (including our custom "World's Fastest Interns" version), some very cool posters, a ceramic Y-MP model, obligatory mugs, a cool 1-800-BUG-CRAY coaster, so on. I would call them up every so often after leaving there, and have them send me rolls of new posters and such.

      That was a unique experience... I had a security pass to the machine room, full of Cray C-90, Y-MP, X-MP, Cray-1 &
  • My math shows this to be a 6u unit (72/12=6)

    There are quad-opteron 1U boxes... So currently 6u of space can hold twice as many Opterons as these Cray units (24 Opterons with normal servers, 12 Opterons with the 6u Cray). The rapidly approaching introduction of dual-core Opterons would allow 48 opteron cores in the space this 12 opteron Cray.

    Yes, the Cray has many extras, (The FPGAs for example?), but for pure power, you might be better off with normal servers.

  • The end of custom CPUs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @02:08PM (#10442247) Homepage
    Sort of sad they abandonned their custum CPUs for these commodity CPUs. Their liquid cooling was pretty nihilistic. You'd think there would be a lot to be gained from the old techniques of restricting everything to 64 bit operations, liquid evaporation cooling, and quad core parts.

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