7 Aug
2012
7 Aug
'12
6:38 p.m.
On 08/07/2012 07:51 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I don't know that I'd call the 180-960 a "supercomputer". It's
much
later (1988) nd not as fast as a 7600 (1969)
The Cray-Cyber folks clain a Cray YMP-EL, which, again, is somewhat
questionable as "supercomputer" (1992, 133Mflop/CPU) considering the
time. Compare, for example, with a "real" supercomputer from 5 years
earlier, the ETA-10 running at 10Gflop.
"Supercomputer" to my mind, depends on a the relative level of
performance for the time.
I have several YMP-ELs. This is a muddy area...They were sold as
low-cost (~$300K) development machines for development, debugging, and
generation of executables for "big" YMP-class supercomputers. As such,
they are binary-compatible.
It's faster than a Cray-1, and they're aesthetically very pretty. (a
hallmark of supercomputers! ;))
Most people (myself included) would consider it a supercomputer. When
it was sold, it was considered a supercomputer. There are nearly always
"faster" (and what constitutes "faster"?) computers out there. Does
that mean that a given machine is somehow not a "supercomputer", because
there's another machine out there that's faster?
MFLOP/S per dollar? Per watt? Per pound? Per cubic foot? Per
coolant loop? Vector length? Vector PRESENCE? Parallelism? But then
what is parallelism? (parallel bits, parallel instructions, parallel
processors?)
This whole obsession with strict definitions and classification, which
we slide into with some frequency on this list, is rather silly, don't
you think?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
How about a large CDC or IBM?
There are still Cyber 960s (in very small amounts). The CDC water
machines are out of service.