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Cray for Sale - Cheap - Some Assembly Required 152

Posted by michael from the priced-to-move dept.
"For quick sale: Supercomputer of distinguished pedigree, a CRAY Y-MP C90, one of the world's most powerful only seven short years ago, an extremely reliable workhorse for R&D computing. Get the jump on your competitors! Bring this black & gold beauty home to your research center or lab today!" Read the story or place your bid. ... If you've ever wanted to go to the top of the distributed.net stats, here's your chance.
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Cray for Sale - Cheap - Some Assembly Required More

Cray for Sale - Cheap - Some Assembly Required

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  • "The first time I heard of Cray was from an old copy of ENTER Magazine (A off-shoot of 3-2-1 Contact). The article went into detail about how a cray was used to do some of the CG effects in the film "The Last Starfighter" (I think)."

    I can definitely confirm this. I saw the exact thing on an old documentary. You've also just caused some serious dejavu right down to your user name... Must be a glitch in the matrix.
  • What ever dude, at least I don't have to reduce my self to name calling...All i'm saying is that it can be ported (even if it takes a shitton of time and effort). I'm sure that there were people like you when beowulf was being developed being all negative and stuff...
  • as of Sun morning 00:54 EST, the highbidder has the positive feedback in reference to trading....

    BEANIE BABIES !!!!!!!!!

    I'd sure as hell would check out how serious this guy if I were one of the PSC-folks.

    total random net-weirdness. _shaking head ..._

    Roland
  • PS2 == toy

    1) Please explain what a toy CPU is. Do they only do silly, frivolous operations?

    2) Is PS2 still a toy when Sony sticks 16 of them in one box [slashdot.org] and sells it in direct competition with SGI machines?

  • Hmmm, moderated down twice for overrated. Funny thing is since my karma is maxed out, I didn't gain any points for being modded up, but I lost points for being modded down. Ah well, knew I was going to lose karma for that post anyway, just assumed it would be as a troll...
    --
  • Oh man, this is what I have been looking for. I have been scowling all over eBay for that new Quake server... looks like this is it right here.
  • A vector processor and a vector unit have almost nothing in common

    Now I'm confused. Don't they both do math on arrays of floats?

    And what's with the aggression? Try talking to me like that in meatspace.

  • I got to see that machine on a field trip from school one time. In fact, I got to sit on it. :) Nice padded bench around the 'C'-shaped CPU core.
  • 1 * Cray = $35,000:
    - 4Gb RAM
    - 16 vector CPUs

    Cranking SETI@Home blocks like mad: Priceless

  • That's $35K for 16 PowerMac G4's.
    PowerMac G4? My Duron @788MHz does a little over a gigaflop. The whole system would be worth under a thousand brand new...

  • For a few moments I seriously considered that my lab might want this beast -- we do a fair amount of computing on a Beowulf cluster now, and I'm anticipating more need for cycles in years to come. But even at the opening price of $35,000, the machine doesn't compete well with commodity workstations anymore.

    I went over to Penguin Computing and priced their eight-Pentium-III rackmount server with all the trimmings. It came to $70,000 for a system that comes surprisingly close to the Cray in power.

    The Penguin Computing system has 8 Pentium III 550 MHz processors (with 1MB L2 cache each). If you were buying a real system, you'd probably try to use the much nicer Athlon series, but you'd certainly get something closer to a gigahertz from either AMD or Intel. Either processor has multiple pipelines, so you're likely to get more than 1 FLOPS per MHz of processor speed in optimized applications. You could expect perhaps 0.6 - 1.2 GFLOP per processor with this system, or 1-2 GFLOP with a system that used higher clock speed (Athlons might deliver higher pipelining multipliers?). Multiply by eight processors, and you find you should be able to expect 10-16 GFLOPS out of the rackmount server. The Penguin Computing machine has a fully cross-linked bus, so RAM bus contention is probably about equally problematic between the two machines. The PC machine has 2GB of memory (compared to the Cray Y-MP's 4GB), but this may be extensible (at ~2K/GB). The Magnus has dual 75GB hard drives, easily matching the Cray's disk space, but it also has a gigabit fiber link and a kickass graphics card, which the Cray lacks.

    So the rackmount Magnus system offers comparable performance to the Cray, at twice the initial bid for the Cray (a reasonable estimate for the final price).

    Now let's consider additional costs. The Cray requires that unspecified pieces of paper be signed to satisfy the U.S. government, adding unknown bureaucratic cost. The Magnus does not. Shipping and installing the Cray will require thousands of dollars. The Magnus requires about a hundred dollars. The Cray requires special power and a cooling system. The Magnus dissipates about a kilowatt and hence can get by with an extra HVAC vent. It does notrequire special power. The Magnus, dissipating about 1kW of power, would require perhaps $60/month for electricity; the Cray, with at least a factor of 10 more power, requires at least $600/month (plus the added cost of cooling the dinosaur pen).

    So the Cray sounds fun to get, but (surprise!) it just doesn't stack up once the inconvenience factor is added in.

    I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Even an I-Opener is in the same ballpark these days as a VAX 11/785 -- at least for memory and raw FLOPS.

  • Yeah, I couldn't manage that brand of ultra-sophisticated humor that slashdot specializes in...
    --
  • "that chip"?

    Seems odd he would say that, since the RISC processors in the new AS/400's are the same (archetecture wise) as any Regular PowerPC; the only difference really is that the CPUs in a Silverlake are optimized for straight proccess crunching, not FPU like a G3.

    As for the older CISC designed from the rackmount days, Linux is already sucessfuly booting.. well, to a single-user shell, at least :)
  • Ha! The current top bidder has previously sold beanie babies. Quite the leap, don't you think? See his/her feedback here. [ebay.com]
  • hey, always nice to run into another rensselear guy on /..

    -----------------------

  • Re:Sieze the power. (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:04PM (#808439)
    Hi, I actually work at PSC (the group selling the system) and I have to say its a damn fine computer. You should all buy one now. Seriously though, this is not a linux box and the possibility of porting linux to it would be a daunting (if not impossible) task. I'm also not sure that the current set of licenses for the OS and other tools found on the machine are transferable. You'd also have a devil of a time installing this. The power requirements are outstanding. Not only do you have to deal with the power draw, cooling issues, wireing issues and so forth... You would also need to rewrite most any program you wanted to run on the sucker if you wanted it to use the full capabilities of the machine. How handy are y'all with FORTRAN? And yes, there is a good chunk of precious metals in this box in the work of wiring and connectors. It would cost much more to extract them then the value of the metals. And no, we can't ship this outside of the United States and I don't know about any restrictions on sales to foreign nationals. Lastly... Quake? What the hell are you smoking?
  • Apple says a G4 is capable of 3 gigaflops. Since we know their marketing department is full of liars, let's say 2 gigaflops. That means only 8 G4s to equal the computer power of the Cray. I could get over 15 G4s for the price that they're selling that cray. Let's see, half the price....or full price? I'll buy the G4s! Brian Tobin Artificial Cheese [artificialcheese.com]
  • Where are all those infernal Slashdot "First Post!-ers" now, eh? Any of you wanna give into the temptation of "First Bid!"?

  • YES! If i had 2 million or so to throw around (gross underestimate) I could save alot of money on shipping seeing as how The Place selling it is ~1 City Block from my apartment.
  • Hmmm. I wonder how much it would cost to get one upholstered?

  • SETI (Score:1)

    by TheLer ( 209287 )
    Heh, I could crank out some serious SETI units on this thing :) And with 130GB, it would make one hell of a pr0n FTP server.

    Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
  • the poster doesn't know what the hell he's talking about

    Please point out the factual errors in my post.

  • Must have sucked in the summer. :)
  • Silicon Graphics owns a stake in Cray, and I believe SGI sold off the rest of Cray not long ago. Cray's life didn't last too long, and now what of Silicon Graphics?

    They've moved away from their 3D and graphics servers as Sun and Apple have eaten away at their sales, and instead moved to lower end Linux and Windows PCs. SGI is becoming "just another box maker."

    Shame. :-(
    I miss marveling at SGI as a kid. Unfortunately, their market just doesn't grow enough, despite its high margins. Even SGI's technologies are a bit oldline. Their OS is non-standard (even though it's way cool), and their hardware is starting to get a lot of competition from Apple G4s. My cousin works in Hollywood graphics and says production studios are moving away from SGIs and opting for Apple machines, except for the final batch rendering process.

    What is the fate of SGI? Their stock is low and they're sales are still faultering. Worse, they don't have much direction. Any thoughts?

    I hate to say all this, 'cause they're just so cool.
    :-(
  • Why is this moderated offtopic and not FUNNY?
  • Seti would love to have to utilizing a cray to process data units, I'm sure they'd do what they could get get a port ASAP!! That's pretty much a donation of super computer usage!

  • Since linux IS OPEN SOURCE....YOU COULD PORT LINUX TO SUPPORT 32 procs couldn't you???? I think that you've "just come off stupid to anybody knowledgeable enough to know what you were talking about".
  • I believe the EV68 is an Alpha, and Linux does run 64-bit on them. IIRC, Titannic was rendered on a farm of quad-processor Alphas.

    Brent

  • Hope you have your own power plant (Score:3)

    by Dhrakar ( 32366 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @09:11PM (#808452)
    We used to have a Cray Y-MP where I work... One little detail that has not yet been mentioned is that a Y-MP is water cooled. So, anyone without their own heat exchange unit and/or chilled water suppy need not apply ;-) Also, the thing used about $20,000 of electricity every month. Yipes!

  • man... (Score:4)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworldNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday September 02, 2000 @04:28PM (#808453) Homepage
    Imagine a Beowu--ok, I'll stop.
    --
  • CRAYs are old and obsolete at the USD Supercomputer Center, but one or two of them are still seeing active service. While the're not the most powerful things anymore, their red and grey color really spices the place up ;-)
    Another interesting fact is that the're the only systems there which still require coolant to circulate over the mainboard(s) to keep them from overheating. I heared a story from the sysadmin which is interesting: About five years or so ago, the coolant system choked up and the CRAY's boards, chips, etc. fried. They literally had to use a fire extingusher to put the blaze out.
    Let's just hope the one who buys one from EBay has a firestation nearby ;-}
  • Hey, it worked for me. We had a Connection Machine CM5 scale 3 in our apartment and ~4gigaflops for $300 makes it a much better buy than that Cray.

    Don't all real geeks have a supercomputer in their garage or apartment? Am I the only one?
  • Actually, you are right, you do get a wholesale rate. Part of the requirements of running one or more Crays, as I have done, is to have sufficient backup power. We had 12 battery backup units, each with 32 car batteries. That would keep the Crays running for 4 minutes. After that the 3 12-cylinder deisel engines would be running at full speed and supply power endlessly.

    When we had hot days in Minnesota, the local power company would call us and ask us to switch to deisel power so they could use their energy to power everyone else's air conditioners. In return, we got a major discount on power.

    Note: the 4 story building takes up a whole block, but has no furnace. Even in the dead of a Minnesota winter, the Crays heated the whole building including the indoor parking ramp...and we still needed to vent heat out via fans.
  • Man, if I had a CRAY at home... think of the options. i'd be the most popular person on the block, that's for sure. Oh wait, my neighbors aren't geeks. hmm... What's the bidding at?
  • thats sweet man i will take 2, humm i bet that has some power requirement,i wonder how long it will be before your common every day laptop pulls a gigaflop, proably not long linux on my machine says that i run around 1600 due to my dual processor configuration,also go to crays website http://www.cray.com they have a 148mb mpg that talks about new product lines and the way the medical industry has to compute cells and how they work with each other and a estimated speed requirement of 1 petabyte
  • Should I set up a pool for people to chip in to buy a share of this thing? Let's see...a Perl script to check the PayPal balance and place the new bid on eBay? The hard part would be the scheduler and accounting tinkering to allow proper sharing based upon participation.
  • Hrmm, is there a functional Linux port to the system, or would I have to run NetBSD?
  • Because its a cray! and you call yourself a geek...
  • Yeah, but like he said...he's in a dorm. Rensselaer would be footing the electrical power bill for me if I decided to buy it.

    Hmm...one year tuition at a top-notch engineering school or a Cray supercomputer.
    Oh what the hell am I thinking - my parents would murder me.

  • Re:SuperLinux? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get real. Linux? OSX?

    Here's a nickle kid, buy yourself a clue.

    There is almost zero chance of anything running on this other than the cray os. But why would you want it to run anything else than an OS that has been loving created and specifically tuned for this architecture? Its not something to make pretty pictures with. I don't even think it has much in the way of anything but the most rudimenary graphics capability. Dataset would be post processed by nasty evil powerful graphics workstations to make all the pictures you know and love. This box is solely built to crunch mountains of numbers and thats about it. Everything is geared towards that.


  • In the early 1990's one of our state colleges sold off it's obsolete Cray for one dollar. The catch? Whoever wanted to buy it also had to spend thousands removing the wiring and cooling systems.

    I've always wondered if they got that idea from Mr. Hainey of Green Acres.

  • When the outside temperature went above 95 degrees fahrenheit, we had to immediately shutdown the Cray T3D otherwise all systems would overheat and crash. We selected the T3D for 3 reasons:
    1. The T3D could only be used for batch jobs - a C90 was it's front end. Any failed jobs would restart from a checkpoint.
    2. The T3D was the second largest heat producer. The Cray-2 was first, but it was our primary fileserver and shutting down the Cray-2 would hang all systems.
    3. The T3D required more electricity than our deisel generators could provide, so it would crash when the power company asked us to switch off of their power feed. Of course they only did that on the hottest days.

    If I failed to power down the T3D in time, the Cray-2 would crash first. It was the most sensitive to temperature. It happened, but not on my watch.

    Last year MSC decommissioned the Cray-2 and T3D. I don't know what they do to heat the building now.
  • Yes, it would cost a buttload to run this system, even just for 15 minutes. You can't even boot it without the proper power and cooling infrastructure.

    So you don't run it. Paint it black. It looks like something that would only be comfortable in the Batcave. Quite ominous and menacing. I think that its design was meant to scare the bejesus out of Cray's competition.

    Some info: to remove just one processor, you need to hook up the crane and winch. It cannot be carried safely by just 2 people. The control panel is a monochrome LCD from Apple that was used in their first Powerbooks.
  • Uhmm...

    Don't forget that the cray has _16_ compared to the 8 G4s.
  • ASCI White is the only machine doing 12 TeraOps. The next fastest is a trio of 3 TeraOp machines at each of the 3 ASCI centers (LLNL,LANL,Sandia).

    As fast as 12 TeraOps is, its still far, far too slow to do real 3d, first principles physics simulations that involve a wide range of scales (which most real problems do). When they get to 1000 TeraOps, we'll be getting somewhere.

  • Re:Linux on AS/400 is coming (Score:3)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @10:36PM (#808469)
    Xunker is right, if you have a RISC-based AS/400, i.e. a modern one, it is using PowerPC under the hood.

    IBM has recently committed to porting Linux to the AS/400 platform (not to OS/400, the operating system) - this will be done very much the same way they already ported AIX, i.e. you'll have Linux running directly on the PowerPC hardware, with some extra software to arbitrate between OS/400 and Linux where needed, and handle Linux-OS/400 communications.

    Should be very interesting when it's all done - every single IBM platform, including the most proprietary AS/400 and S/390 ranges, will be able to run Linux apps, and porting should be relatively easy providing apps are not byte order dependent etc.

    Ironically, IBM tried in the 80s and 90s to provide a way of easily porting apps across all its different OSs and architectures, through a set of development tools and APIs known as System Application Architecture (SAA). They failed. It would be rather cool if Linux solved this problem for them :)
  • Vector processors work on streams of floats - hundreds of floats is nothing special. That's why bandwidth is so important on these systems, one wants to be able to supply a constant stream of data in and out.

    Each PS2 VU has 16Kb of embedded, single-cycle data RAM. The recommended usage is to split up the memory and quad-buffer: At any one point, the CPU is DMAing data into one portion of memory, the VU is operating on a second portion, storing the results in a third portion and the system is DMAing processed data out of fourth area. When everything's done, you rotate the buffers along 1 and repeat. Provided the VU has enough to occupy it for at least as long as it takes to DMA the data in/out, you can run a VU at full-speed indefinitely. That means real world, sustained 4 flops per clock at 150MHz is quite feasible. Does that not qualify as streaming?

    A games machine's vector unit is basically a 3D engine - vectors of 3 floats, and 3x3 matrices

    Yes it does process 4 floats at once. So? They can be completely independant floats, it's just processing them in parallel. Cray vector regs (IIRC) consist of 128 elements, does that mean it's only good for doing calculations in 128-dimensional space? You also seem to be under the impression the VU is not properly programmable but it is. Each instruction does an integer/compare/branch op in parallel with the vector op.

    You obviously based your post on a half-arsed knowledge of PS1, which is a million miles away from PS2 architecturally. Do a little research, find out how wrong you are and next time skip the unwarranted rudeness ok?

  • Linux on S/390 is there because they want to port e-business apps to all their existing platforms, and because they understand Linux is going to commoditise operating systems. Unlike many other vendors, IBM really seems to 'get' Linux.

    One useful application for S/390 Linux IMO is hosting very large numbers of dedicated-server websites on a single box - every customer gets their own virtual Linux machine, hosted on VM/390, which has 30+ years of tuning behind it.

    The customer gets more power and flexibility, and the hosting provider gets more maintainable and reliable hardware, rather than having racks upon racks of Intel-based servers that will inevitably have frequent individual box failures, even though most of them are available at any one time. The only flaw in this argument is the cost of mainframe hardware and system programmers, but if you host enough websites it could be worth it.
  • Cool. I wonder if there is finally a workable Linux build that I can run on my RS/6000 PowerServer 550H in the basement???

    Anyone? Anyone?

  • Wow.... I would prefer that one just because of the coolness factor. I would trade my old coffee table/couch for that thing any day!!

    And it's probably got warm seats too :)

  • if by ultra-sophisticated humour you mean idiotic remarks that make me wish i could use a killfile while reading /., then yes, i agree.

    Burnin' Karma, since we're not allowed to use it anyway.
    ----------------------------
  • And besides, if this lot ever got together and bought a cray, everyone would just be fighting over who gets to be root.
  • Absolutely perfect transaction.... Prompt delivery of perfect specimen beanies!!

    Thats got to be one of the most disgusting things I've ever read...


  • Would the military allow this? what if someone overseas wanted to bid... exporting super comuter tech is against the law.. isn't it?

    Well, most firms have a solution for that problem.
    They just build them outside the USA.
    And don't forget that most European research institutes had lots of Gray's.
    Apple solved the problem quiete easily.
    The G4 processor is build in Asia.
    Second, Apple has a plant in Ireland and Singapore where they assemble those G4-machines for sales outside the US.
    The only problem Apple has is that importing those machines into the US is quite expensive.
    That's why Apple only imports the processors and assemble those G4's in two fabs in the US.
    The same goes for IBM, Compaq and Sun.
    Outside the US there is nobody boycotting Cuba, Syria etc..
    US law doesn't count outside the US ((-;

  • Well, if purchased for graphic creation, like it has been said before, it would make a wonderful backend for 3d processing, that is, if somebody can code up the correct interface for it. Since intense 3d rendering is in fact massive fp number crunching it would be excellent for this purpose.

    Even then, there are much more efficient ways to put your dollars to work. I see this selling to an entity more interested in its historical value than anything else.

  • that's good info man! as for the auction, doesn't it give you tears? i mean, fsck!, things like this are worthy to be treated otherwise!!!
  • Last week egghead was auctioning off a group of IBM AS400's. Okay, it's not in the same league with a Cray, but still... when I looked in on it, they were going for $9. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of getting one, but then I saw 2 gotchas...

    1. Shipping was $185.
    2. Operating system NOT included.

    Since they're weird RISC boxen, God knows if they'd run anything but OS400, which would probably cost several thousand dollars.

    Garg
  • Cool, I live about three miles from the Pittsburgh Super Computing Center. If I win the bid I can just drive over and tie it to the roof of my Tracker! I looked in my lease and the landlord doesn't say I can't have a super-computer in the apartment.
  • $35K for 16 GigaFlops.

    That's $35K for 16 PowerMac G4's.

    Seems about right. But watch this thing climb upto $100,000 by the time it's through, just because of the prestige factor some ISP could have... (yeah, we're serving your pages off of a Cray)

    I don't think anyone's going to buy this to do any serious gruntwork, these days... I'm betting that an RS/6000 would end up being a better deal... considering you don't get any service or support when you buy this thing...

    Ohhh... but it is cool. I give it points for that.

  • Re:Sieze the power. (Score:5)

    by jlg ( 215187 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:16PM (#808483)
    We could have the first community-owned supercomputer. Imagine the possibilities...

    Well this is kind of a good idea, but you will be happy to know that it has already been done.

    The US government spends millions of dollars on supercomputers every year. Some of the computers are for Classified projects, but many of them are for research purposes. These research computers are like a national computing resource. You paid the tax money for them and, if you're so inclined, you can probably use them. If you think you have a project that would benefit from a supercomputer, you can apply for time on one.

    If you buy your own Cray you'll be guaranteed time on it, but you'll also be burdened with maintenance and upgrades.

    Try these links:

    NPACI Allocations [npaci.edu]

    www.sdsc.edu [sdsc.edu]

    www.ncsa.edu [ncsa.edu]

  • Yeah I know, he shoulda at least said Quake 3...for christs sake, get with the times!

  • That means only 8 G4s to equal the computer power of the Cray

    Apples and Oranges (sorry about the pun). The bandwidth, bus-speed, memory size/type, etc. of the Crey will destroy any workstation you could throw at it. If all you're doing is SETI, go for the G4's. If you are doing scientific high powered computing, there is no comparison.

  • Re:Drat! (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    No, that's the point; it really had a built-in couch [umn.edu], by design!


    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Actually, this isn't a publicity thing. We made the decision to try selling this on EBay because we had nothing better to do with it. It cost more money to keep in production than it was worth. The deinstallation costs were running at $35k and it was just going to go back to cray salvage anyway. We decided to see if we could get $35k for it and it seems we have been able to do this.

    As a side note, most people don't have these problems as the vast majority of Cray's were leased. We bought ours outright though. While list might have been $30.5 million I think we dropped around $8 million on ours. Educational discount you know.


  • i wonder how long it will be before your common every day laptop pulls a gigaflop

    Wait till Apple releases it's Powerbook G4.
    Up to 3,6 Gflop vector unit inside the G4 processor with a sustained rate of 1 Gflop.

  • I work for a group that could actually use this box. But, alas, while we could afford to buy and power it, I don't think we could afford to pay for the setup costs.

    And I know for a fact that I can't administer it!

  • ooh wah and when was the last time apple was used for super advanced number crunching, any way apples stuff is all through the d\usage of a plugin which is off there verlocity instruction chipset any way who is stupid enough to buy a apple for any thing inportant they would buy a sun workstation before they would spend the cash on a apple specialy becuase you look at the price apple wants then you realize that there software support is crap, then you take a look at sun then you realize that the os is very common very powerful and reprogrammable you don't need a plugin to get a giga flop out of it and its not to much more expensive than a apple and it has variable cache sizes

  • This report [ucla.edu] summarizes the experiences of the AppleSeed Project [ucla.edu] in performing real-world parallel supercomputer calculations on G3 and G4 Macs. They acknowledge that communication latency is a killer, but for embarassingly parallel codes, a G4 AppleSeed cluster does quite well and is much easier to use than a Beowulf cluster.

  • Can you make them out of Lego?
  • "You just aren't getting it are you? The Cray doesn't have any significant graphics capability. That is not what they were built for. They just offloaded the datasets on to another computer which actually made the pretty pictures you love so well. The Cray crunched the numbers and another machine actually made the images from those numbers."

    Exactly, I couldn't agree more. Mostly because it's the truth, but that's beside the point. From what I remember, and this was years ago I saw that information about the Last Starfighter, the Cray was used to render everything. Now, since this wasn't a documentary about a computer but rather, one about a movie (which was very cool) they didn't add that the Cray was actually used to make the actual end product. Jeez man, don't fly off the handle next time. I realize that the Cray wasn't/isn't made for it's awesome graphics presentation capabilities, I was just commenting on a documentary. Don't play that "I know more than you" game, man. It's cool and all that you know about that stuff, but keep the spirit of information sharing alive and don't be elitist about it.
  • Now all I have to do is convince my parents that I need this for.... educational use.

    And the small matter of $35000
  • To view all the machines in the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, among which this machine is listed, go to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in the TOP500 [top500.org].

    Anas

  • Reminds me of this (fictional) story I found while I was randomly searching the web the other day...

    http://www.all-electric.com/gee kworld/scomfort.html [all-electric.com]

  • Someone did (Score:3)

    by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:19PM (#808498) Homepage Journal
    Ok not thies... but the much older Cray 2s... back when they were new and such a setup did not yet exist.

    War Games.... The computer in the book was 7 Cray 2s.. They scaled it down to one larg black box in the movie...
    (I guess the tech of 7 Cray 2s wouldn't impress the non-tech movie going public... my mother thought it was some sort of joke to use one larg black box sence she recognised it as a mini-mainframe.. she not being any sort of tech felt anyone would recognise this if she could.)

    Anyway... Yes someone accually thought of doing a cluster of Crays... a bit before anyone accually made such a system...

    Now imagin Wopr going HAL and trying to pull a Forben project...
  • You don't actually buy the OS from IBM, it typically only comes with the hardware. Oh yeah, the licensing is crazy too -- the media you install is specific for the hardware you're installing it on (at least it is for the larger servers)

    Want upgrades? You'll have to pay through the nose for their support contracts. Ours costs in the neighborhood of 7 left-of-decimal digits for premier support of about 13 AS/400s.

    Want parts? hahahaha..

    They're a whole new dimension of hardware and software. On the bright side, they never ever ever ever crash. Just one of our as/400s under a pretty good load has out uptime'd our entire NT, solaris, and linux server farms.

    But never fear, IBM is porting linux to the s/390 -- The as/400 may be on the horizon.

  • Original cost = 30.5M (Score:5)

    by cheshire_cqx ( 175259 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:25PM (#808502) Homepage

    According to this article [cmu.edu] the original cost of a Cray Y-MP C90 was $30.5 million.

    Some specs from utk.edu [utk.edu]:

    • 4.1 ns Clock Cycle
    • 15.6 Gflops/s maximal
    • 16 GB main memory
    • 12 GB/s single proc. memory bandwith
    • 2-16 processors

    Apparently, today's fastest supercomputers are at about 12.3 teraflops [llnl.gov]! Still, I bet the power bill on the C90 still packs a punch! (But at least you won't need a heater in the winter!)

    ---
    In a hundred-mile march,

  • Ever _used_ a C-90? (Score:5)

    by plambert ( 16507 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:50PM (#808504) Homepage
    I ran the original distributed.net RC5 client on one CPU of an 8-cpu C-90. It got about 85Kkeys/sec. Yes, that's _85_. Not 600+ like intel processors of the time get.

    C-90's do vectors. They don't do integer work. vi? slow as a dog. emacs? slow as a dog. CFD simulations? it'll knock your socks off.

    Most people were very surprised when they would log in and see how _slow_ it was running a shell. Think 2-3 seconds to get a response to the 'date' command.

    Would you use a sprint car to go to the grocery store? Wouldn't get you there any faster than my Geo Metro, would it?

    C-90's are incredible machines; the details would fill you with awe. But given that there's no hardware documentation available, and hence no OS's other than COS and Unicos for them, and limitations like _no MMU_, it's really only useful for batch processing of vector work, i.e. floating point.

    It'd make a kick-ass rendering back-end, if you could get someone to write the software. Otherwise, leave it alone.

    --plambert
  • PSC is one of the biggest supercomputing centers in the world. They were just awarded a $45 million dollar NSF grant (As Seen On Slashdot) for a new array of computers. PSC is no gamble! The ebay thing is just for publicity...
  • The non-obvious thing that you're probably missing is the shared, multi-port memory. For some classes of problem you absolutely have to have a single large bolus of memory for the crunching to work well. Progressive problems like 3-D fluid simulation require that each processor work in more-or-less parallel on each timestep, but be able to interact with data that's handled by the other ones. That's the weak part of distributed computing systems (which have higher latency and lower transfer rates than dedicated systems with shared memory), and it's why I didn't consider the bare-bones Beowulf solution. But, yah, for many problems the bigass collection of cheap workstations really is the best way to go.
  • Previous threads have mentioned how much Crays sucked at general computing tasks (rather than the very fast number crunching that they excelled at).

    Could somebody explain to me why you would *ever* run emacs, vi, or the like on one of these babies? Wouldn't it have been far more efficient to have cross-compilers and the like, and only ever run code that the Cray was built to run - cracking Russian cyphers, forecasting weather etc. etc.?

  • The 8-cpu box is not a cluster, but 8-way SMP. (Which is why no Athlons yet, btw.)

    Also, if you want a serious cluster, you're going to want faster interconnects than 100bt. For what it's worth, you can get 1u rackmount nodes with Pentium III 800s and gigabit ethernet from Penguin Computing for about $2000.

    --

  • Yep... once, a long time ago, I was playing on a Cray-YMP. I mean literally playing: I got XTetris to compile on that thing, renamed the binary something scientific sounding and played one game for like 1:30 hours (yes, one CPU is very-very slow :-)... The kicker: I was on the console of an SGI Reality Engine at the time :-) I got some really weird looks from people wondering why a Reality Engine (probably the best graphics machine series ever) couldn't keep up with XTetris :-)...

  • This or an SGI? (Score:3)

    by jsmaby ( 217465 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:26PM (#808518) Homepage

    It looks like this would be about comparable to your average O2000 SGI. These systems go for a lot more than 35k. The problem is that research grants take much longer than 5 days to go through, and even if 100k was allocated for an SGI, the department can't just change the wording of the grant. Also, research departments like to get thier hardware from official sources. Getting something on Ebay would be considered a gamble, and one doesn't gamble with 35k of thier research group's money. I don't think ebay is the right medium to sell this system. It will probably be bought privately for much less than it's worth.

  • I'll buy if.. (Score:5)

    by BLiP2 ( 54296 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:26PM (#808520)
    There real question here is, does the seller except payment by paypal? ;)

  • Re:Why buy CRAY when you can have a G4? (Score:4)

    by fgodfrey ( 116175 ) <fgodfrey@bigw.org> on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:28PM (#808521) Homepage
    This is the same kind of comment that pops up every time there's an article talking about real supercomputers. The big difference is that you will *never* see 3 gigaflops on a G4 outside of some specialized benchmark. When you're on a real Cray, you're usually striding through so much data that the processor cache is totally useless (vector Crays before the SV1 [or maybe the J90] didn't have a cache). That means that you fall back on the bandwidth of the memory bus, which was not designed for memory references on almost every clock cycle.

    In addition, the Cray is going to push a lot more stuff between disk and memory than that G4. Not important? Well, try dealing with several hundred gigabyte files constantly and disk performance becomes an issue.

    Basically, the Cray is designed to run at or near peak performance constantly. The G4 (and all other personal computers) are not.

    Also, it takes 8 G4's to equal a Cray from 1991. That's pretty good for an almost 10 year old machine...

  • I only want to know one thing... (Score:3)

    by meckardt ( 113120 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @06:11PM (#808522) Homepage

    Does it run Seti-At-Home?


    Gonzo
  • There were clusters of Crays before War Games
    came out.
  • Actually, which one wins depends on the problem. AppleSeed [ucla.edu] at UCLA Physics has performance comparisons. If the task can be separated into discrete subproblems, then the G4s do a pretty good job. The main difference is in the inter-CPU communication speed (much slower on the G4 cluster).

    -Dave

  • Please try to get 8-way SMP Intel boxes to do any serious inter-process communication. They suck! memory contention issues and bus-speed (not to mention sucky Linux SMP) make 8-way (and actually most 4-way SMP) machines *much* slower than 8 single-cpu Pentium boxes. The best bang for the buck is probably a cluster of dual PIII-Xeons with the new 133MHz buses.

    Yes, you can kick a Cray's ass with that thing, but a) you are gonna need some fast (gigabit speeds) iterconnects that aint cheap, and b) you need software that will take advantage of the setup. And still, if you re-write your software to be vector-friendly (not trivial, but not the hardest thing in the world either) a Cray can still kick some serious Beowulf butt.

  • Re:I'd buy it.... (Score:3)

    by phish junkie ( 203569 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @04:42PM (#808536)
    The Cray could be your dorm room.. With the fans that thing must have, you'd always have cold beer around. And when chicks hear of your 16 gigaflops, they'll be lining up.
  • If the OS license is locked to the box (as I understand it is), how could an AS/400 exist without a license?

    I'm really curious, since I'd love to own an AS/400 just for the sheer heck of it -- but I'm sure the price of getting a license would be prohibitive on, say, one of the older $200-500 machines.

    D


    ----
  • I always just wanted the case.

    It would make a cool couch/refrigerator combination! No living room should be without one.

    The real thing would eat up my entire paycheck just in power usage alone. Might help heat the house though...
  • Many leases don't let you have waterbeds because of floor loading issues. Now, think for a minute about the floor loading of a CRAY YMP C90. Hint: I've never seen one installed on a 2nd floor. They're mostly in basements.

  • Re:Why buy CRAY when you can have a G4? (Score:3)

    by jlg ( 215187 ) on Saturday September 02, 2000 @05:37PM (#808548)

    Maybe the G4 can theoretically achieve 2 gigaflops, but I challenge you to prove it to me on a useful application. I'd be proud of you if you could get 25% of that number.

    The main reason you would want this instead of a G4 is that it's memory is much faster than a G4's. The C90's main memory (4GB) is like your G4's cache (not 4GB) in terms of speed. Even when your faithful CPU meter reads "100%", your CPU is often idle. It has to sit and wait for memory requests which take quite a while. The cache can only do so much.

    It is true that this C90 is getting old and most of them have probably been decommissioned. However, I am sure that there are still C90's out there in use and they can't be replaced by Macs.

  • 1 * Cray = $35,000:
    - 4Gb RAM
    - 16 vector CPUs

    175 * PSX2 = $35,000:
    - 5.6Gb RAM + 700Mb embedded VRAM
    - 175 CPUs
    - 350 vector units

    350 PSX2 vector units could process 1400 floats per clock, and they run at 150MHz. That's some serious gigafloppage, and it's not even using the rather capable CPUs.
  • Just a comment on the distributed.net comment written by the Slashdot monkey. I've compiled the stock testing core on the C90 at my work. Single processor, it did something pathetic... ~12kkeys/sec. The Sparc-1s we have do better than that.

    Yes, if someone wants to try vectorising the core and implement MPI (rather than running 16 seperate clients at once), it might do better. But I doubt it. These are built for math, not bit-shifting.

    On that note, the Seti client, I could see doing a LOT better. Again, after vector optimisations. But you can't get any code for that client...
  • > Its name is Mario, after Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins,

    Irony I'm sure...
    I suspect Tux didn't exist yet when Mario was named...
    Still one must suspect if Tux is a sports fan this would be his fav team...
  • Because, based on the other messages on this thread, it would be worth absolutely nothing to them. It's a specialized machine designed to solve specialized problems.

    If it costs $ 35,000 to de-install the system, a church or charity couldn't afford to take it in any event.

    D

    ----
  • According to a (rather old) PowerPC FAQ at http://www.motorola.com/SPS/PowerPC/library/ppc_fa q/ppc_faq.html, the skinny is:

    "IBM uses a custom 64-bit PowerPC processor -- the PowerPC AS -- in their AS/400 business computing systems."
  • Hee. =)
    I, too, own a Tracker (hey, I just turned 18, so flah)...as if the thing doesn't roll easily enough already. :P

    Barrel Rolls = BAD
    Barrel Rolls w/ a Cray on da Hood = REALLY BAD

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