18 Jan
2014
18 Jan
'14
5:22 a.m.
On 01/17/2014 12:06 PM, allison wrote:
One has to remember what the machines were used for.
It was designed
to solve very large problems that create huge arrays. Oil mapping is
one thing that does that, the others explode.
Two local machines that I remember was Apple, using Cray in their Esthetics Design Lab and
another at Industrial Light and Magic to control the models in many of the scenes from
Star Wars.
Another Lucas company, Droids Inc, had one on order. Whatever happened to them anyway?
The US Navy had at least one in Monterrey at the Fleet Weather Station.
I can't find my notes, but I'm certain that GM had one or more in their design
department in detroit.
Billy
18 Jan
18 Jan
6:57 a.m.
On Saturday, 18 January 2014 4:34 PM, Billy Pettit <bpettitx at comcast.net> wrote:
On 01/17/2014 12:06 PM, allison wrote:
<snip
>Billy
Another Lucas company, Droids Inc,? had one on order.? Whatever happened to them anyway?
Are you think "Droids works" makers of EditDroid and SoundDroid?
19 Jan
19 Jan
3:37 p.m.
fre 2014-01-17 klockan 21:22 -0800 skrev Billy Pettit:
On 01/17/2014 12:06 PM, allison wrote:
Volvo in G?teborg was a early commercial buyer of its own Cray (before
they used the one in Link?ping who in the beginning was bought partly
for the Gripen project.)
Volvo used its machine for simulating car crashes and doing FEM
modelling of cars and truck.
I expect that GM (and Ford and Chrysler) had its own super computers and
that they used them for basically the same thing.
One has to remember what the machines were used
for. It was designed
to solve very large problems that create huge arrays. Oil mapping is
one thing that does that, the others explode.
Two local machines that I remember was Apple, using Cray in their Esthetics Design Lab
and another at Industrial Light and Magic to control the models in many of the scenes from
Star Wars.
Another Lucas company, Droids Inc, had one on order. Whatever happened to them anyway?
The US Navy had at least one in Monterrey at the Fleet Weather Station.
I can't find my notes, but I'm certain that GM had one or more in their design
department in detroit. 
5:23 p.m.
On 1/19/14 7:37 AM, Stefan Skoglund wrote:
I expect that GM (and Ford and Chrysler) had its own
super computers and
that they used them for basically the same thing.
They did, and do use them. CHM has a later model one from Ford. We asked,
but no software or documentation for it was given to us, so we have several
tons of iron that will never run again. I guess the good news is it was
saved from the gold scrappers.
Once you get out of the Cray-1 COS era, the OS is UNICOS and FORTRAN or C.
The problem now that the guy trying to get COS running is he's got the base
system but no languages. Kinda boring..
It was not uncommon for sites to run their own OS on the Cray-1 hardware.
LLNL and LANL both did this. Good luck with the FOIA request to look at that
post 9/11.
The architecture of supercomputers radically changed when they moved from
pipelined vector machines to massive parallelism. There is little in common
with the Cray-1 and any MPP Cray other than the name. This is why it is
unlikely anyone will have saved the original Cray software, there was no
practical use for it once the machine was gone, and the fact that it was
all Cray proprietary stuff that may or may not have been stored at the
customer site.
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