9 Sep
1998
9 Sep
'98
1:25 a.m.
I'd always heard that Crays
were best fed a colossal program and left alone, but didn't realise it held true
for most/all mainframes.
Crays (at least the old ones) like to be left alone to crunch, requiring
human interaction just about every day when they crash or break (the price
of being in front of the edge). The new ones are better.
Speaking of Crays, one of the first *big* computers to
inspire lust in my
heart was a Cray 1. Anyone got one of THOSE in the basement?
Well, I am looking...Cray, ETA, Connection Machine, Convex, Multiflow,
MasPas, nCube...
They are out there - I think one of the M$ biggies has a small collection
of Crays and CMs.
Then there is that ETA-10P in the basement of a high school out here on
the East Coast.
And can
anyone tell me how they stack up to modern computers performancewise? I was
exposed to one at an impressionable young age at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, and know next to nothing about them.
The line is really getting close these days. An UltraSPARC or Pentium
whatever has the horsepower in the CPU, but the old Crays still beat them
out for I/O bandwidth (and resulting sustained floating point
performance). That should fall quite soon, then it will be up to
the X/MPs to carry the Cray standard.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net