A Software Fix May Revitalize the Supercomputer (1995) | Hacker News Reader

A Software Fix May Revitalize the Supercomputer (1995)

nytimes.com

30 pointsrbanffy6 comments

The Tera was not a success. I remember people trying to get me to use it for graph problems, but it didn't really provide anything I couldn't do with a regular computer at the time.

Yeah, lots of people didn't try. What it provided was a way to get over 90% utilization of the processors (every processor issuing useful instructions most every clock tick) without worrying about cache misses. So relatively simple code, useful tools, and high performance. But if you didn't care about any of that, then it didn't provide much.

I'm familiar with how the architecture was designed, and if I had chosen, could have ported code. However, like I said, it didn't really perform any faster than a PC of the time on any code (even ones optimized for the platform). Writing massively multithreaded code, maintaining it, tuning it, and then keeping an entire separate platform for something that isn't measurably faster for a wide range of problems is a huge cost/burden to developers.

I certainly cared about performance but like most people we found that general purpose computers that ran all our codes quickly were not a cost/burden to developers.

I found lots of things that ran much faster on the Tera than on a PC. But yes, if you are happy with the performance of a general-purpose machine, then there's little reason to take on a super. Machine-room requirements alone would finance a lot of off-the-shelf hardware.

We had a Tera MTA (serial #2, IIRC) at SDSC when I worked there. It looked really cool, but I never got to use it.

Tera bought Cray Research in 2000 and renamed itself to Cray, Inc.

(Hi Keith!)

The article is from before they got their funding, the system (well, you know what it looked like, but for the rest of HN) looked like this:

https://goo.gl/images/cPJQ89

It was more than 2m tall at the top, but the actual computer bits underneath the MTA "wave" case were smaller than people might think. I want to say it was a cube-shaped machined frame holding the CPUs/Memory/IO bits, maybe 3'x3'? I remember there being a smoke detector, what seemed to be a regular household unit, on the inside of the case...

IIRC, it was liquid-cooled w/ Fluorinert, and the cpus were on some custom GaAs process...I had to swap the control workstation for it at one point, and to make sure that the serial connection to it was still good I watched over Victor H.'s shoulder as he tipped in. While it was at SDSC, the Tera MTA ran a Tera-customized FreeBSD 3.3 OS.

Good times...

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