
Game Tales: Cray YMP (2010) - the-enemy
http://rome.ro/news/2015/12/13/gametales-cray-ymp
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DonHopkins
I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray
supercomputer, in a computer room with a big observation window that visitors
could admire it through.

Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them
to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the Cray, pulling up the zipper
of his jeans, with a relieved expression on his face.

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mrpippy
It seems to me that if you wanted a multi head-capable supercomputer in the
90s, SGI is exactly who you would buy from. A rackmount Onyx or Onyx2 could
support lots of graphics heads, at least 8 CPUs, tons of memory, and it was a
fairly normal/popular UNIX. Was there anyone doing this sort of work on Cray
machines?

~~~
ethomson
Yeah, I was a bit surprised reading this, myself. $500k for a Y-MP does seem
like a nice price - I assume they were getting a machine that had been
previously loaned to someone who was upgrading to something massively
multiprocessor.

But it seems like the SGI Challenge architecture makes more sense in 1995. An
Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics. A Power
Challenge GR would as performant as the Y-MP, again with superior graphics,
though I suspect about the same price. And anything from SGI has better OS and
development tools than UNICOS did at the time. Plus they're easier to install,
power and cool.

I suspect that moving over to Win32 probably conferred a lot of advantages,
developing on the same system that is your target market. I wonder if they
would have ultimately done that even if the Cray deal was on the table.

~~~
jwr
> An Onyx would be half the price of that Y-MP, with superior graphics.

As someone who used both: it also would be a massive downgrade in terms of
reliability and system stability. The Onyx I had access to had regular
problems with various system hangs and lockups.

~~~
ethomson
Interesting. I'm sorry to hear that; I actually never used an Onyx but I went
from a Cray 2 to a Cray X-MP to a Power Challenge. I was skeptical about Irix
and the Challenge, mostly because a bunch of consumer-ish processors seemed
like a downgrade, but it turned out to be both fast and rock solid for my
workload. That said, I was a consumer, not an administrator, so it's very
possible that our admins kept the reliability issues from affecting me.

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kyberias
What an awesome cynical ending: "John decided that developing on Windows 95
was the way to go."

~~~
to3m
This sort of decision is probably why John Carmack is now CTO of multi-billion
dollar corporation Oculus VR, and John Romero is... umm... well, I think he
lives in Ireland now?

Mind you, you might also like to count how many awesome genre-defining games
Carmack worked on after Romero got the boot...

~~~
pvg
_how many awesome genre-defining games Carmack worked on after Romero got the
boot_

Not that many, really, after their collaboration ended.

~~~
AceJohnny2
Whoosh.

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aquamo
not sure if the link is broken but the article is about using the CS-6400 for
a build machine, not the YMP. Generally the YMP would make a bad "build
machine" \- parallel vector Cray systems were slow as shit doing scalar things
like compiling code. I was fortunate enough to work on 3 pre-release 6400
series machine, they were not supercomputers per se (at least in our opinion)
but rather large Sun Solaris servers capable of up to 64 CPUs (a lot for the
day); this line eventually turned into the E10K from Sun IIRC. We had 3 of
them and once the bugs got worked out, we were able to keep them running.

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frik
I wish we would have the option to buy superior computers nowadays. 10 GHz 16
core hundreds of GB RAM in a desktop tower. Innovation kind of stopped, now no
one invests on single core performance anymore. Notebook CPUs are still at two
core and less than 3GHz. People come up with myth that Hz doesn't matter - yes
the memory and everything else got faster, but faster clock speed still
matters. Maybe AMD's new CPU is a wake up call to release some new better
CPUs. It's time to rethink the Pentium3/PentiumM/Core/i7-architecture, maybe
give a different architecture idea (like Pentium 4) a new spin.

~~~
ido
Or that it got a lot harder/more expensive to further improve single core
performance the further we go along, rather than intel/amd being lazy.

