Update From Cray World

rchatterjee writes "Cray, the only mainstream recognizeable name in supercomputing, has been busy lately. Their totally new MTA-2 supercomputer design will use a UltraSPARC-III powered Sun Fire 6800 server to just feed the data to the MTA-2's processor. They're also refocussing on Vector Supercomputers and are going to release their first new vector supercomputer since Tera Computing bought them, the SV-2 in 2002. And if that wasn't enough they have a deal with API networks to develop Alpha processor based Beowulf clusters of Linux machines that as a cluster will run the same operating system as Cray's T3E supercomputers. Seymour Cray would be proud. You can get a quick overview of all the latest Cray developments from this article on Cnet."

Imagine...

....A Beowulf Cluster Of Those.

Oh wait, nevermind

Proud?

I'd hardly say that Seymour Cray would be proud. My feeling is that Mr. Cray was about innovations and pushing the limits of what computers can do. Today's Cray is doing little more, in my view, than simply rehashing the same old technologies with higher clock speeds and more CPUs thrown at the problem.

If Cray was alive today, I like to think that he'd be directing research into quantum computers, and maybe technologies like Starbridge Systems is working on.

Hold it!

The first person to mention Quake loses a testicle.

Re:Proud?

Actually, Cray was working on quantum computers and biological computers way back in 1996. Read this fascinating interview [si.edu] from that year.

I agree with you that Cray was not only about pushing the limits of technology--he was working on the Gallium Arsenide Cray-5 at the time of this death--but also about innovation in computer architecture.

A great example is the CDC 6600, his first parallel computer for Control Data Corporation. It had many innovations that only later came into popular use. It was a parallel processor, essentially a pipelined machine. It had a pure register load/store architecture, with a hardwired zero register, similar to many future RISC designs. There are many more, but I gotta run....

Actually Seymour would be disappointed...

Cray's whole creative enterprise centered around making a machine that was hand-tooled to be the fasted machine that one could build with the best engineering one could invent.

The original Crays (and CDC-6x00 machines) were crafted to take advantage of the efficiencies of the speed of light in their busses and memory configurations (i.e., cable lengths cut to sub-millimeter tolerances). These new "crays" are crays in name only... they lack the creative zeal that made "real" crays the exciting machines that they were and that launched the supercomputing industry...

These are just glorified SMP machines...
Don't get me wrong, clusters are great (hey, I even wrote a book on them!), the CPU speeds we have now are beyond my wildest dreams, but there will never be another Cray...

Bzzt! Cray is actually quite busy these days

Sorry, but I disagree strongly with you that cray is just 'rehashing old technologies'. As a primarily Cray shop (we have a T3E-900 and, after this weekend's upgrade, have the first SV1e) we are quite involved with the Cray User's Group (CUG) meetings and such where Cray's plans for the future (SV2 and beyond) are discussed.
There are _many_ things going on behind the scenes at Cray that show that Cray is once again trying to push the supercomputing envelope as far as they can. One way to look at the SV2 is as a T3E with large vector units in each CPU (no e-registers) and a nearly flat (shared) memory space across all processors. Thus, no need for mixed mode (MPI and OpenMP) programming like on IBM SP-like architectures.

Re:Actually Seymour would be disappointed...

Yes, the Alpha Clusters are just that - clusters. There is a lot of creativity going on with their new products, however. The SV2 is a completely new architecture with pretty-much everything being custom designed. It combines the benefits of the vector architecture with the scalability of the huge parallel T3E-style machines. And the MTA-2 is an all-new (commercially) architecture - so new that the first people that will probably purchase them will be researchers trying to figure out how to best use them.

So, yeah, Cray is branching into some lower markets, but they've finally escaped the creative dearth (at least on the high-end) that is SGI.

Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o

The entire idea of supercomputing is obsolete?!?!?!?!?! Someone better tell that to the hundreds of places still buying supercomputers and SGI, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, Cray, and several other companies who all make them. As people have pointed out, there are many reasons for buying a real supercomputer rather than a bunch of 286's, which I'm sure Google doesn't really use (Pentiums I would believe):

Management: Which would you rather manage - 1024 seperate PC's, each with their own boot disk, hostname, power supply, etc. or a Cray T3E with a single system image, and one boot disk. Think about the time it would take to do an OS upgrade on the cluster.

Bandwidth: Stuff like Myrinet and Quadrix (sp?) is quite good but it still doesn't come near the bandwidth that you can get on a traditional supercomputer. Google and SETI@home are *horrible* examples of real scientific code because they do almost no internode communication. We can get 1.6 gigabytes/second full duplex between nodes on our Origin 3000 product. T3E gets even more than that.

Latency: The time it takes to get from node A to node B matters *a lot* with real code. Again, SETI and Google don't care if it take 100 microseconds instead of 4 to exchange data. When you are exchanging lots of data and synchronizing with many other nodes, this matters. Many massively parallel jobs spend large percentages (like 25%) of their time doing communication. A lot of this is very small messages.

Quality: Usually, you get better components when you buy a supercomputer than a PC. Does this matter for you? Probably not. If you are trying to predict where a tornado is going to touch down, you're going to be a lot more interested in whether the machine is running.

Ease of coding: It is a lot easier to use a model of coding called OpenMP, which relies heavily on shared memory between threads, than MPI in which you have to explicitely call for communication between threads to happen. OpenMP runs best on large SSI supercomputers.

Now don't get me wrong - there are many applications for which a cluster is sufficient. This doesn't mean there is no room for supercomputers. Besides, if you look at the direction Quadrix, Myrinet, and the new Infiniband stuff is going, they are going to end up looking a lot like a shared memory supercomputer....

Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o

People don't buy vector supercomputers so they can run MySQL and Apache. They're for scientific programming. Think of scientific programming as Weather analysis, car crash tests, airflow analysis, etc. There are people and companies who use computers for a lot more things than you've apparantly realized.

Also, would it shock you to let you know that Cray machines have TCP/IP stacks, and ethernet ports, and all that? They don't have video cards, so you have to connect to them somehow...

What about the "Cray SX-5 Series"? :-)

Okay, I'm a NEC/HNSX Supercomputers employee, on the verge of becoming a Cray employee (because of the agreement they signed), but I'm not speaking for anyone else but me here, of course. :-)

I don't know why people bother with such a news. Sun's gonna provide the I/O processor for a not-so-high-end supercomputer. And?

A few weeks ago, there was a real bombshell: Cray would drop the anti-dumping legal action, re-opening the US market to japanese supercomputers. Cray will even become the sole reseller of the NEC SX Series in North America!

If you go take a look at www.cray.com [cray.com], you'll see that this agreement with Sun occupies a single line in their news listing, while the NEC agreement is a big framed box that occupies about half of my screen here.

For some time now, american supercomputer customers were petitioning to get japanese machines, because it been a long time the american machines had been up to any good. Instead, we hear about the SV2, which will barely surpass the few years old SX-5 processing power, with less memory throughput than the SX-5.

I won't deal with the "no need for big clunky vector supercomputers, we have clusters". I believe a whole lot into clusters, but they're freakin' hard to program, and some things just won't be as fast (hey, the SX-5 CPU has a 256 bytes wide memory path! that's not bits, that's bytes! what can you do with your puny gigabit ethernet cluster interconnections?).

Look at these bandwidth benchmark scores [virginia.edu]. The closest thing to a cluster, the Origin machines, are literally crushed to bits by the SX-5. And they're doing twice as good than the SV1.

As for using old big iron machines for stuff like fridges and so on, there was a cool thing at one of our customer site, at the University of Stuttgart: a Cray coffee table. :-)

Nothing beats talking about supercomputer technology while drinking some orange juice on top of a Cray machine. NOTHING.

--

Smithsonian

The Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum has a Cray 1 on display. [nasm.edu] Look at the specs, the cost, and reflect upon Moore's Law.

Its processing speeds, of around 150 million floating point operations per second, were far above anything else that the time of its announcement in 1976. Those speeds are now matched by inexpensive workstations that fit on a person's desk.

A boon for altivec?

The refocus on vector supercomputing is interesting. I wonder if it might have a side-effect of helping scientists take advantage of the Altivec units on PowerPC G4s. Yes, I know the Altivec can't do double-precision floats, but you don't ALWAYS need that, and companies like GCG in the biotech industry are excited about taking advantage of OS X on G4 hardware for bioinformatics. For tasks that don't need the full power of a Cray, but are nonetheless vectorizable, I hope the cross-pollination of vectorization in algorithm design will benefit everyone.