Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now)

[Swift Griggs]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote:
> The Cray is single phase, the only thing I've ever owned that was 3 
> phase was the laser stuff. Now my solid state laser projector uses 100 
> watts and producsed half the power of the argon that used to take 3ph @ 
> 30A (and still tripped the breaker sometimes.)

I haven't been able to articulate anything witty, but I'll go ahead and 
just say: Ethan I don't know what you do with those BF-lasers, but it 
sounds damn awesome, anyway. Your stock just went up. It's hard to make 
lasers anything but sci-fi radical coolness.

> I've heard sometimes the utility will indeed give you 3phase but you 
> have to pay them to replace the transformer and it's very very 
> expensive.

Yep. It's happened in every case I've been involved with here in Colorado 
(ie.. residential or small buildings, not in data centers).

> Normally it's people buying used milling equipment that are after it 
> from my experience. There are rotary converters and solid state 
> converters but probably not ideal for huge loads.

... and as I mentioned before, they can break. So, even if your VCF will 
handle the load, your uptime requirement might be a dealbreaker if you 
have commercial intentions.
 
> The Cray uses 5 x Pioneer magnetics power supplies that I believe are 
> identical to those in the Sun E10000.

"back in the day" I was a certified (not as an FE, though) in various ways 
for the E10k, E15k, and E25k. We had several at Oracle when I worked 
there. However, I don't remember that detail (the brand of the PSs). I'm 
sure you are right, though.

> Note - in the modern datacenter in the US it's not uncommon for 
> everything to be run on 208, but everything would run on 120.

Yep, that's my experience, too. Although many telco datacenters still use 
DC. They are funny like that.

-Swift