On Aug 18, 7:41pm, John Young wrote:
The Cray 3 supercomputer, two years late to market when it appeared last year, has not yet found a customer, and Cray executives said they were pinning their hopes for survival on the Cray 4, due to be completed in the first quarter of next year."
From what I know of the Cray III, it is a flourinert cooled system about the size of a small filing cabinet. It's CPU is manufactured from GaAs, although
Don't confuse Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) with Cray Research Incorporated (CRI). The former was formed from the later, with a cash grant of several hundred million dollars and Seymour Cray as head designer. Prior to this, the Cray vector range had split into two different streams. One was the series which went from the Cray I through the X-MP into the Y-MP series. They were essentially variations on the same architecture, and stressed compatibility with previous models. This range is still aggressively supported by CRI, which is doing quite well for an exclusively supercomputing vendor. They're even learning that the entire world doesn't have multibillion dollar budgets (hence the EL, EL92 and Jedi models). The second range began at the Cray I as well, and then went to the Cray II (designed by SC, still part of CRI at the time). Then came the split, and Seymour headed off into CCC, taking his GaAs Cray III project with him, and CRI stayed with the highly successful [XY]-MP line. the main memory is still silicon. Because of the signal propogation timings involved in running with a 2nS clock, they've ground the wafers down to 0.125 mm thick to pack more of them into the same space. There is a very interesting ACM talk given by Seymour Cray which details all of this, and it is widely available on video. This is not meant with any disrespect to him, but I was surprised to find that he is a very entertaining speaker.
A way to keep Cray afloat? If so, why not Thinking Machines?
Why Thinking Machines over CCC, or even CRI for that matter? After all CRI have the rather interesting T3D system.
Okay by me. Maybe then he can afford to share all his supercomp secrets.
Secret: take lots and lots and lots of money, use the most exotic packaging technologies you can find, pay lots and lots of attention to your memory system and cache, don't forget the importance of a nicely balanced architecture (meaning that I/O does matter), don't forget the importance of good compilers, and implement bit counting instructions just like the NSA tells you to. Hardly a secret, don't you think? Ian. #include <std.disclaimer> I am not speaking for SGI, folks.