
Closure. "I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design." - stakent
http://steveblank.com/2009/11/19/closure/
======
andrewljohnson
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.

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patio11
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.

~~~
minsight
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.

~~~
stakent
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.

~~~
sblank
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.

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

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ramanujan
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).

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hristov
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?

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jeroen
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.

------
jodrellblank
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".

