
Cray Announces New, AI-Focused Supercomputers - artsandsci
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/249149-cray-announces-new-ai-focused-supercomputers
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coleca
Cool looking server rack doors.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a designer at IBM Raleigh. He showed
me models of some of the server rack designs that he worked on at IBM for
their super computers (I think it was Blue Gene). He said they had a bunch of
CIOs that were upset after having spent ungodly sums of money on a fancy new
IBM supercomputer and seeing it look just like all the other miscellaneous
racks of servers in their datacenter when they went on a tour. So to appease
these CIOs, they created all kinds of designs on the rack doors that looked
like DNA sequences on the server doors so that you could 'tell' this cluster
was doing gene sequencing just by looking at it and the CIO could proudly show
off his new toy.

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spitfire
SGI used to have super cool systems like this. You knew you were getting $40K
worth of value because your workstation _looked_ like it was worth $40K. Look
up SGI O2, Octane, Indy, etc.

Similar in the servers with the Onyx and Origin servers. They _looked_ like
you had gotten your moneys worth. And at the time, you did.

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mturmon
The SGI kit definitely had looks that were a notch above the competing
workstations of the time:
[http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2015/2/...](http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2015/2/18_The_evolution_of_the_power_workstation_files/powerworkstations-1990s.jpg)

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mbreese
Yeah, the O2 and Octane looked great, but their cases felt like cheap plastic
up close. I remember being very unimpressed with my first exposure to an SGI
workstation because of this. Actually working on it was great... it was just
that the cheap plastic of the case ruined the entire effect.

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enf
The previous generation (Indy/Indigo2) felt rock solid. The cheap feel of the
O2 was a real let down. But they probably couldn't justify the cost of making
really nice keyboards and cases once Linux became serious competition in every
other way.

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Sephr
The Nvidia Tesla V100 is out now, and it's 12x faster for inferencing than the
Tesla P100 cards in this.

If the Tesla V100 is priced at all similarly to the P100, you would have to be
very incompetent and far abstracted from actual devops to consider purchasing
one of these computers for your company's AI and deep learning needs.

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lowglow
Honest question: What makes this super?

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FireBeyond
Exactly, it's pretty much identical to Nvidia's own DGX-1 (actually, the DGX-1
will be faster, because it's now using the Volta GPUs, a generation ahead of
Pascal):

2 x E5-2698 v3, 512GB memory, 4 x 2TB SSD, 100GB Infiniband, and 8 x P100 (or
Volta).

$129,000.

[https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/11/14/nvidias-saturn-v-
dgx...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/11/14/nvidias-saturn-v-
dgx-1-cluster-stacks/)

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lowglow
Yeah, I'm not sure why I would compete with Nvidia on their own turf unless I
could do something bigger/better, but Nvidia will always have the advantage of
information.

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jvreeland
A big reason to buy a Cray is the experience they have. There's not a ton of
people who've run large systems as long as they have. The technology may
originate from Nvidia but Nvidia doesn't have a 40+ years experience building
and supporting massive machines.

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mswen
Very much this. And, that they have very high-end technicians that are cleared
for top secret/classified data centers.

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DonHopkins
If they would just go back to their roots and make round sofas, I would buy
one.

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gumby
Pioneers in seat heaters to warm your cold butt!

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rburhum
these two guys have been at the SV Computer History Museum :)

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DonHopkins
I posted this before, but it's worth repeating:

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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CocoaGeek
Wait, Cray is still around?

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pinewurst
It's more a brand name at this point - like "Westinghouse" items sold at
Target.

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jwr
No, not quite — their interconnects are very impressive. It's true that they
don't make CPUs anymore, but that stopped making sense a long time ago. If you
want to be a supercomputer company these days the value is in the interconnect
and software.

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inopinatus
Surely also in the cooling systems. I remember on my visits to the Edinburgh
supercomputing center, the quip was that Cray were a refrigeration company
first. Like Tesla is a battery manufacturer.

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gbrown_
That will have been for HECToR, an old XE system. They use the ECOphlex system
which is a liquid evaporative phase-change cooling system using
tetrafluoroethane.

The current XC line of supercomputers from Cray utilize more conventional
cooling methods.

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inopinatus
Oh, this was much further back. The last time I set foot in the JCMB was
around 1996. I think the main workhorses of the day were a Cray T3D/T3E. ISTR
there was a Y-MP in there as well.

