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Closure. "I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design."

steveblank.com

79 pointsstakent13 comments

I worked at the PSC when we sold that Cray on eBay. I was a student programmer in the facilities group. I used to sell Magic cars on eBay, so I was consulted on selling the computer on the internet. Some part of my brain says it was my idea to sell the computer on eBay, but I'm not sure that's true... probably isn't.We just were trying to recover some of the costs of getting rid of the thing when we sold it. They are massive edifices that need water cooling infrastructure.

These Crays are really quite beautiful things too - this one was done in Black and Gold to commemorate the Penguins as I recall. Each Cray had custom colors. The enormous platinum circuit boards in thm are absolutely fantastic, and they are worth a good bit of money each.

At the same time we were getting rid of this one, we were installing the new massively parallel PC system called Lemieux: http://www.psc.edu/machines/tcs/- the terascale machine. I did some manual labor to install Lemieux down at the Westinghouse Power company, where all the PSC computers were housed.

I guess Steve Blank was just ahead of his time at Ardent.

What an over-the-hill supercomputer looked like in 2000:

'16 vector processors, each capable of 1 GFLOPS performance, main memory amounting to 512 MegaWords (4GB), and a 512MW (4GB) Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) serving as an extension to memory. He comes with raid controllers and disks providing over 130GB of high-speed disk storage.'

I am again reminded that our industry is insane. That machine is not even a top-line laptop anymore.

Yep, that's closer to a netbook. Oh I'm excited about the future.

Yes and no. If you compare memory capacity and GFLOPS, you will often find that those computers seem relatively unimpressive compared to what we have now. The value (and cost) in that hardware is often in capabilities and features that aren't necessarily reflected in numbers and bullet points.

If you were to take that machine and put it up against a 1 GFLOP desktop with the equivalent amount of RAM and disk storage, the Cray would annihilate it on the tasks that it was purchased for.

True. Because it was designed for this kind of tasks.

That is true for almost every specialised hardware.

On the other hand, take a GPU fitted to the graphics card of your desktop. I suspect it will outperform Cray in this kind of task. Especially if one takes price into account.

GPUs (i.e. Nvidia and AMD/ATI) are the linear descendants of these supercomputers. Today's standard GPU's have vector processing units with fixed pipelines optimized for graphics operations.

Glen Miranker and Jon Rubenstein of Ardent made their way to Apple where they spec'd/designed the Velocity Engine that went into the PowerPC G4/5. It had a 128-bit vector execution unit that required the use of the AltiVec API.

I have an SGI Indigo in my office. It's a paperweight now; 10 years ago it cost around $10,000 and was the CAD workstation to have.

Sigh. At least it's pretty to look at!

You should put a mac mini (or some other small computer) inside the case :)

Wanna log in to one? http://www.cray-cyber.org/systems/yel.php

Hmmm. So in 7 years it depreciated from $35e6 to $35e3. Thousand fold depreciation corresponds to \log_2(1000) ~= 10 halvings in 7 years = 84 months, so about one halving every 8.4 months.

Moore's law is generally reported to be doubling of transistor density every 18 months -- though of course the analogous laws in storage and the like have varying time constants (e.g. GPUs were at one point moving a lot faster).

This depreciation would then be at roughly double the speed of Moore's law (i.e. 8.4 rather than 18 months).

Right, and the Ardent "personal supercomputers" he was suggesting would have been just as much scrapmetal as that particular Cray.

BTW what in the world is a personal supercomputer? Does he mean a workstation?

Price of a 15 year old supercomputer: $45K. Shipping not included. I wonder how much Cray paid him for it and whether it was a good investment.

They can buy a $35million supercomputer, then whinge about $30,000 to dispose of it?

There's something weird that happens when large amounts of cash are involved. It seems to suddenly stop mattering about whether it's a million dollars too much or too little.

I wonder if it's like the colour of the bike shed problem? There are so many details ... surely someone else has checked them. But oh - $200 for a set of door stops, is that right? Oh we need 200 of them? OK. Whole quote seems fine.

I speculate that if Cray had included $250,000 in the original sale price to cover disposal at end of life, with a suitably impressive name, they wouldn't have questioned itand then years later would be praising Cray for removing it "for free".

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