17 Feb
1998
17 Feb
'98
7:56 p.m.
Well, I personally doubt anyone will actually pay that
amount since you
could get similar computing power from a contemporary PC for a fraction of
that price
Umm, really...
Even a low end EL would waste a hotshot PeeCee in a real world number
crunch contest. A Pentium II (or Alpha, or UltraSPARC II) just can not
keep up a good, sustained vector flow like a Cray. Getting a decent 100
Mflops is very hard to do on a desktop system today, but not for a ca.
1976 Cray-1. If this Cray for sale is a decent Y/MP type, it could
probably sustain many hundreds of Mflops, perhaps into a Gflop.
And then there is the issue of the memory bandwidth...
so that rules out anyone wanting to buy it to put it
to useful
work, which leaves only the possibility that a collector or musuem would
buy it, but again, not for that amount. I say wait for them to move on to
the decision to scrap it and then try to bid on it.
But it won't be cheap.
RCS/RI is going to have to look into this...
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net