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Hardware

A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers 164

Posted by timothy from the they-rest-for-a-bit dept.
Steve writes "Every geek has wanted to play with a Cray supercomputer. Hexus.net had the rare opportunity to meet up with a man who has something of a fetish for collecting them! They got a look at some of the amazing kit Armari - a systems integration company - have in their possession. Ever wanted to see inside a Cray T3D MPP, or maybe the gargantuan machine that is the T90? Now is your chance!"
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A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers More

A Private Home For Retired Supercomputers

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  • Cray (fish) (Score:2, Funny)

    by weizur ( 787688 )
    Now if I could only get my CRAY-fish collection to have the same credit...

  • YMP... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Jaruzel ( 804522 )
    I had the luxury of playing with a Cray YMP at the MoD (in the UK)... Just a big number cruncher with a VAX/VMS front end. Lovely to look at though.

    • Re:YMP... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:03PM (#10777913) Homepage Journal
      And therein lies the problem. Most super-computers were purpose-built and are thus not too useful for general purpose programs. Some optimizations that have been done to these machines means that a 486 might even be faster on certain code!

      It's a lot like comparing a luxury yacht to an aircraft carrier. Sure, the carrier is pretty damn cool, has lots of capacity, and lots of features. Unfortunately, the carrier is probably not going to move an inch without a full crew and military grade servicing. All of those great things you thought you would get from buying an old carrier [fleetairarmarchive.net], you find would have been better served with a new yacht.
      • Unfortunately, the carrier is probably not going to move an inch without a full crew and military grade servicing.

        You make military grade service sound like a good thing. Silly civilians...
    • Same for me at NASA's Mission to Planet Earth - EOSDIS project http://spsosun.gsfc.nasa.gov/eosinfo/Welcome/index .html [nasa.gov].

      Amazing how fast a cluster of Cray YMPs can execute "Hello world"!
    • Lovely to look at is pretty much it.

      The operational cost of keeping them powered is often pretty high, and if you get too old of a unit, then they are easily outpowered by a desktop computer. Then you have the special purpose vs. general purpose machine, as vector machines don't do so well in many mundane tasks.

  • Now is pretty short... (Score:4, Funny)

    by apanap ( 804545 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:51PM (#10777786) Journal
    Now is your chance

    Yeah, cause in 10 minutes it'll be slashdotted...
    • A better question is why geeks would have a fetish for Crays at all these days, other than those with a historical bent. Believe it or not its not like you are going to have some transcendent experience logging in to one, unless you really get off on Fortran and vectorizing code. Obviously they have some fine massively parallel machines but so do a lot of other companies. If you have an app that you want to run that fits on a Cray then maybe its still interesting to you but thats not most people.

      OS wise
      • Good point. Here's how to get the experience, or something close to it. First, get a Pentium III machine, maybe 800Mhz processor. Fill it up with at least a gig of memory, and a terabyte of disk space, implemented as a large array of IOMega Bernoulli drives, 40 megabytes each. Install Linux on it. No, not Redhat, I mean Slackware. Do not install the X server. Install your Fortran compiler. Oh, and I forgot to mention, you will interact with this machine through a VAX front end. You won't log into the machin
      • I wonder if the electrical infrastrucutre and hvac engineering hardware could be effectively reused with modern processors?

        I recall studying an early (Nazi Germany era) jet engine. It had all kinds of very sophisticate systems (e.g. liquid cooled turbine blades) to get around metalurgical limitations. Some of the features actually went from nearly 50 years before they were implemented again when materials technologies were a limitation and exotic work-arounds were required.

        Yes, history may have passed t

      • A better question is why geeks would have a fetish for Crays at all these days, other than those with a historical bent.

        It's not about the machine, as much as the man and the philosophy behind the machine.

        Seymour Cray was one of the first true legends of computing. His mixture of sheer architectural intelligence and interesting personality quirks made him one of computing's first media stars (for small niche values of media). His architectural philosophy was to do one thing and do it well. For example,


        • I haven't actually RTFA but the two models listed in the submission aren't actually Seymour's designs. The T90 is Seymour inspired but I don't think he was anywhere near where it was built. I don't think the T3E has anything to with him, and am not sure he would have liked it much since its kind of a commodity CMOS(DEC Alpha) based MPP and nothing like anything Seymour would have designed. Thats one of the problems with Cray's deity status, his name has been tacked on so many companies and computers at th

  • Slashdotted Already?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:51PM (#10777789)
    He should have hosted it on one of his Crays
    • Slashdotted Already??

      Not trying to be an ass here, but why do people always say this. Isn't the site most likley to be slashdotted when the story is new. Or should the server some how manage very heavy load and then get tired? I don't get the logic behind the "Slashdotted Already".
      • Well slashdotting usually occures after 5 minutes after the story is posted. It is an issue of probabilty say when the story pops on withing the first fiew minutes only the subscribers get to read this. The subscriber rairly get the site when it is slashdotted nor do they slashdot it. Then when the story goes public. Say 1000 people see it and only 5% will click on the link the same second they see it. Then after a minute or so after everyone else has read the message then they will choose a good link to c
    • Nah. Apache on Unicos doesn't run all that hot. I got bored one morning and built it and load tested it.
      • I'll bet it would make an awesome DSP processor, though! Just imagine being able to record to disk, just about every broadcast in the air! ;-)

        Of course, you'd need a little extra hardware to digitize the signals in the first place...

  • just think (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tazanator ( 681948 )
    can you imagine the AC (both power and cooling)demand for a good quake bake? :)

  • yeah, sure (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:52PM (#10777794) Journal
    Ever wanted to see inside a Cray T3D MPP, or maybe the gargantuan machine that is the T90? Now is your chance!

    You mean now as in tomorrow when the slashdotting is over.

  • mirror. (Score:2, Informative)

    by jabella ( 91754 ) *
    Here are the images, mirrored:

    t3d_2_big.jpg [abellaracing.com]

    td3_psus_big.jpg [abellaracing.com]

    t3d_wiring_big.jpg [abellaracing.com]

    t90_2_big.jpg [abellaracing.com]

    t90_system_board_big.jpg [abellaracing.com]

  • Mummies of the digital age (Score:3, Interesting)

    by teiresias ( 101481 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:52PM (#10777806)
    the mummies of the digital age. we're like treasure hunters only instead of jewels and crowns we're looking for gold lined circuit boards.

    • Re:Mummies of the digital age (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Leela: Professor we need to talk to you about Fry.

      Bender: That's right, we want some money! Wait what's this about Fry.

      Leela: He's a nice guy, but we think it's about time he got his own place.

      Professor: Oh Fuff, he's not causing any trouble. Now if you don't mind I'm rather busy, I seem to have mislaid my alien mummy. This sarcophagus should contain the remains of emperor Nimballa who ruled Zooban5 over 29 million years ago.

      Fry: Hey Professor, Mmmm great jerky.

      Professor: My God, this is an outrage. I

  • Coral (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Working Link [nyud.net]

  • Ive always wanted... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:54PM (#10777824) Homepage Journal
    ... one of those big super computers with all of the blinking lights and huge spool of tape spinning around. I've even known a few companies that were "disposing" of them. Unfortunatly, like most Mac owners, their policy tends to be "Throw it out. Don't let anyone else have it", so to this day, I am supercomputerless
    • Haha...awesome. I guess I'm not the only one who wishes I could walk into a server room still in use today and see the walls lined with huge mainframes, each with their own spinning tape drive...just like in the movies.
      • To get that proper old-school movie computer vibe, I much prefer comms rooms. Standing amongst the banks of routers, switches and modems with their endlessly blinking lights and festoons of cable, it's easy to imagine yourself in a supervillian's control center.
    • It'd be fun to have some of that hardware, but what you're describing isn't a supercomputer. It's just a plain old mainframe.

    • I'm working on collecting old Macs - I've gotten a couple from the chem lab at school when they died, and one from the loft at summer camp (it had been dead for years - I got to take it home). Certainly not as cool as having a Cray, but visitors think it's about as weird. It's my Home for Unloved, Dead, and Dying Macs - kind of a funeral home for them.

  • makes me nostaligic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by m2bord ( 781676 )
    this makes me miss the days of trs80's and writing basic code that you saved to a tape recorder.

    this makes me miss punch cards and the fear you had of getting them out of order.

    it makes me miss...ti calculators where if you held down three of the corner keys, the thing would bypass the on button.

    sigh...i miss the old days.

  • Ah.. memories (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @12:58PM (#10777859) Homepage Journal
    Reminds me of the first time I saw a Cray T3D at the Los Alamos National labs (about 10 years ago, in 1994). The door had this funky LCD display with some graphics on it. As we were watching the water-cooled behemoth inside, the person incharge there said, "watch this" hit a button on the inside of the door. The LCD display went "bing" and a Mac logo popped up! It was a Mac, being used just for the prettiness.

    (years of beer have killed a few neurons, so memory's a bit fuzzy... :-) )

    • Re:Ah.. memories (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:27PM (#10778191) Homepage
      At my former university, they had a corridor with a glass wall which went past the machine room full of supercomputers, many with flashy-looking blinkenlights arranged into grids or in the form of graphical processor-monitoring screens. There were often some weird and wonderful smaller machines, like some Linux-running, Itanium-powered (according to the labels) SGI workstations - this was late 2000, early 2001 or so, and I haven't seen a single Itanic since...

      The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E [leeds.ac.uk] - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article. :-)

      • The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article. :-)

        Yeah I saw a T3E once too, at the local supercomputer center. Quite impressive. When they upgrade
      • Yikes! I read this as "they had a supercollider with a glass wall...."

        Wishful thinking, I guess :)
      • About 16 years ago there was a large computer at my university. It was replaced by a more powerful computer. The large computer was the size of a refrigerator but the new machine consisted of two tower cases you can put on a desk. Suddenly the room looked so empty.

        You can tell the university wasn't the richest because it didn't replace the old machine with one of comparable size.

        A couple years later someone got an 8-processor SGI machine that was the size of the fridge. I looked inside. The processors too
    • I still like the Cray-1 at the National Air and Space Museum, still in active use by visitors to the EE exhibit. Doesn't have much computing power by today's standards, but it has a much more comfortable interface than today's computers, especially after walking around museums all day...
      • As a former Cray employee, I can vouch for the relative "comfort" of curling up on the Power Supply bench for a quick nap... the padding was pretty good. Lots of noise in the room, though, and we kept the air air temp really cold.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:00PM (#10777878)
    Mirror dot has mirrored the link here [mirrordot.com].

  • Price tag (Score:4, Funny)

    by Raedwald ( 567500 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:04PM (#10777942)
    Cray sold a computer to a company I worked for, for the sum of (raises finger to mouth) ONE POUND. Bwahahaha.

  • Computer History Museum (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:10PM (#10777997)
    ... or, if you're ever near Mountain View, California, why not see them in person (and a whole lot more)?

    Computer History Museum website [computerhistory.org]
    • As a matter of fact if you ever make it out the the east coast you can see them (Crays) at the National Crypologic Museum outside of NSA/Ft. Meade. The exit is just off the B/W Parkway.
    • Does Cray still have its Museum in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin? I know these days a lot of the Cray buildings are now used by Silicon Graphics and Celestia, but I think Cray still does a fair amount of work in CF.
      • Yes, there is still a Cray museum there. I don't think it's officially owned by Cray or SGI anymore, though. I was in it a few years ago. They have some of the much older stuff (CDC machines, the Cray 1, Cray 2, etc). Not sure if they have a T90 or T3E, but I probably wouldn't have noticed since I've seen so many in our machine rooms...

  • So how fast are they exactly? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:16PM (#10778084)
    Can anyone tell me how fast these things are compared with, say, an Athlon 2000+?
    • A 2ghz Athlon can pull just over 3 GFlops.

      The T90 had 32 x 450mhz CPUs that could do 4 ops per cycle, which comes out to 1.8GFlops per chip and 57.6Gflops for the whole shebang.

      The real differnce however is not raw cpu horsepower, but memory bandwidth, latency, and scaling. I don't know nearly enough about supercomputers to be able to explain that in detail.

      -Dan

  • Overheard in the rest home. (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:26PM (#10778187)
    It's kind of creepy walking down the halls of this place. From one room you hear: "Stop, Dave. I'm afraid.". From another: "The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus!"

  • Yes, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by saintp ( 595331 ) <stpierre@nospAM.nebrwesleyan.edu> on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:28PM (#10778209) Homepage
    ...does he have a Gibson?
  • I wonder if they will take that old Vic 20 in the back of the top closet shelf. It was, after all, the wonder computer of the 80s.
    • I wonder if they will take that old Vic 20 in the back of the top closet shelf. It was, after all, the wonder computer of the 80s.

      Yeah. Those of us with other computers wondered why anyone would buy a Vic 20.

      • ahh the good old days of going to my mates place , hitting the play button , going ouside for a bit of backrayd cricket , coming in 30 mins later , relise the tape had stuffed up , redoing it... memories Anyway who cares if a effectivly configured array of high end desktops is just as effective , who cares desktops dont have lotsa blinking lights alot of geek street cred a requirment for 3 phase power to your house its like looking at a rolls royce from 1920 yep the car is decidly low tech but boy was it en
  • Armari can also put you together a decent high-end workstation.

    Back in the day (c. 1999) I needed a new workstation. Armari set me up with Dual PIII-400's, LVD-SCSI HD, lots of RAM. Man that was a dream machine in it's day. Set me back of the (then) equivalent of $5,000 but it cut through my compliations like a knife through butter.

    Still running. Man it's a crap machine now though!

  • bah, small fish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by telemonster ( 605238 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:36PM (#10778284) Homepage
    This is a guy's PRIVATE, PERSONAL Cray collection:

    http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jamescurry/index.h tm

    It has to be the most comprehensive collection of Cray systems in the world (including Cray's facility in Chippawa falls?).

    (Please do not post it on the front page of slashdot without digibarns permission). Those pictures are quite a bit outdated, as he no longer lives in that state and has added more systems since then.

    I believe he had over 11 before. He donated a few to someone, I forget who.

  • IBM System/360 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @01:56PM (#10778553) Homepage
    I wonder if any computer system collectors have any IBM System/360 machines that are still in operation.

    S/360 is interesting because it was one of the first standardized architectures created by a computer company. Before that, each seperate machine had its own instruction set and architecture, and they were incompatible with each other.

    A mid-sized functional IBM System/360 is quite a sight. Multiple cabinets of core memory, CPU cabinets, tape systems, consoles with thousands of blinkenlights... A real fun system to watch in operation.

    Hopefully someone out there still operates one for fun. It's expensive, but we have rich geeks right? }:)

    -Z
    • they still sell them its just not called 360 anymore
    • The computer desk in my home is the pedestal/electronics cab from an IBM 3215 console/printer that was attached to an IBM 370/145 from 1971. The cabinet still contains the 8 inch diskette drive used for microcode/diagnostics loading. The diskette drive weighs about 40 kg has a 1/4 horsepower motor. What I really want is the calligraphic display CRT from a 370/168 console or therabouts. Looks better than any dot matrix.

  • Seymour Cray (Score:5, Informative)

    by cloud99 ( 829930 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @02:02PM (#10778640)
    Seymour Cray never designed the T3D supercomputer. Seymour split from Cray Research Inc (CRI) to found Cray Computer Corp (CCC) in 1989. At CCC he designed the GaAs Cray-3 and stillborn Cray-4. After CCC folded in 1995 he founded SRC Computers which was his first attempt at using commodity CPUs. SRC exists to this day but changed focus after Seymour's death in 1996. Other crayons may have better info but I believe that Steve Chen designed the T3D at CRI. Those of us who knew Seymour still miss him. He was quite simply the smartest man I have ever met.
    • Steve Chen left Cray Research in 1987 to start Supercomputer Systems Inc. which was funded by IBM. Actually the Cray T3D team was led by yours truly -- a different Steve (yes, I'm still out there somewhere). The project also had hardware design leadership from Steve Oberlin and software design leadership from Steve Reinhardt. That makes at least three other Steves besides the one who was not involved.
      A couple of technically oriented videos were made by these folks describing the system. (http://www.bibl.ita

  • T90 not an MPP (Score:5, Informative)

    by flaming-opus ( 8186 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @02:04PM (#10778677)
    Considering how tech savy the author seems to be, it's interesting that he doesn't understand what an MPP is. The T3d IS an mpp, made in response to a wave of mpp designs in the late 80's taking some of cray's market share (thinking machines, paragon, etc) MPP, incidently, stands for Massively Parallel Processing; massively as in hundreds, not 32.

    The T90, on the other hand, is a pure SMP. The processors all sit on a shared bus (actually 256 parallel shared buses). Each CPU was really fast (for the time) and had really big pipes to memory, and really expensive.

    Sorry, just picking nits.

  • In the early (?) days the Cray XMP got the most attention, but CDC continued to make supercomputers. The Cyber-205 was it's main competitor. Funny, I can't find a web page dedicated to it. I wonder if anyone collects them.

    A few places (such as Purdue) even had one of each.

    /Don

    • University of Georgia had a Cyber 205. Odd machine, and interesting to compare what jobs ran better on it than the Cray and vice versa. Software wasn't nearly as polished as the Cray. Doubt more than a handful were ever built. Not really much "competition" for Cray in the end.
  • The site's getting hammered. Here some mirrors:

    Mirror #1 [dhs.org]

    Mirror #2 [earlham.edu]

  • I have always wanted a Cray 1 Sofa....

  • Pictures of it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kylegordon ( 159137 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2004 @04:00PM (#10779944) Homepage
    I visited these dudes a few years ago, when down at my friends employers and visiting their cuppliers (Armari). Got loads of pictures of the Cray T3d right here [glasgownet.com]. Wonderful machine, wonderfully kept.
    Dans machine wasn't quite (apparently) 'the first off the production line - Edinburgh uni (where this T3D came from) wanted one that could be upgraded without a lot of hassle. Cray could only offer them this one, which was their testbed unit, wired for a full complement of processors, but not fully populated. That's why it's innards are absolutely stuffed full of wires. Each wire is also a specific length, to ensure that the length of time it takes for electricity to flow down the wire is accurately accounted for in terms of clock ticks.
    The power switch that the author wished he'd taken a picture of is here [glasgownet.com]
    I loved Dans demo of the differing weight of cooling liquids. He had a milk bottle full of water, weighing a kilo or so, and then an identical bottle weighing about 3 kilos. The plumbing for the liquid cooling was done by a bottling plant systems manufacturer in Daytona if memory serves, and the metal braided hoses that are used in it are of the same type used in Formula One and Nascar cars. Wicked stuff :-)
  • If you want to get up close to the Cray Supercomputers of the past, visit the Chippewa Falls Museum Of Industry and Technology in Chippewa Falls, WI. It is about one hour and 45 min. east of Minneapolis, MN. The museum is open daily. Adults can get in for $3.00

    site: http://my.execpc.com/~cfmit/

    It is a great fieldtrip.

  • Cray Museums (Score:2, Informative)

    by cjgross ( 562821 )
    If you want to get up close to the Cray Supercomputers of the past, visit the Chippewa Falls Museum Of Industry and Technology in Chippewa Falls, WI. It is about one hour and 45 min. east of Minneapolis, MN. The museum is open daily. Adults can get in for $3.00
    Site: my.execpc.com/~cfmit/
    Museum of Industry and Technology
    21 East Grand Avenue
    Chippewa Falls, WI 54729
    715.720.9206 tel

    The University of Minnesota also has a Virtual Cray Museum. http://www.cbi.umn.edu/exhibits/cray/index.html
  • As I recall, CRAY owns the OS and you license it. So, if you happened to buy a computer, you could never run it unless you could fork out the cost of the OS license and maintenance for the servers. Besides, who could afford the electricity and cooling?
  • I helped test out that very pictured T3D machine on the lab floor in Chippewa Falls. I helped simulate the chipset for the T3D and wrote diagnostics to test it. I became the resident expert on the "barrier channel" which was a mechanism used for both syncronization and for low bandwidth one-to-all communication.

    Of course, being the very first system, 6001's barrier channel had a bunch of issues to resolve. Armed with just a prom-emulator (each cpu used a serial prom to load it's initial bootcode) and a T
  • I love this line: ".. somewhat like the gullwing doors on a McLaren SLR supercar, makes you giggle like a schoolboy that's just seen his first pair of bare boobies."

    Must been some machine to see... :)
  • Why don't they just take all the old supercomputers and hook them all up to form a supercomputer-ing cluster?
  • I have a board from Australias first Cray X-MP 22 super computer framed on my wall. .. ok, so it doesn't exactly 'pull the chicks', but it's good for geek bragging rights. ;)

    Red.

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