

Cray T94 Supercomputer on Ebay - frozenport
http://www.ebay.com/itm/CRAY-T94-SUPER-COMPUTER-VINTAGE-MAINFRAME-LIQUID-COOLED-/271057315817?pt=US_Vintage_Computers_Mainframes&hash=item3f1c4667e9
"I am liquidating some of my personal collection of unique stuff and my Cray T94 Super Computer must go. What you see in the photos is what I have and what you get. I know that you need more than what I have to make it work. You should consider inspection the item to make sure it is what you want as it is sold as is with no returns."
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yaakov34
Apparently, the Cray T90 in the 32-processor configuration had 360GBps of
_shared_ memory bandwidth - this is still many times above a shared memory
configuration that you can get on the desktop today. Of course, supercomputers
have largely moved on from shared memory systems to clusters, and have larger
aggregate bandwidth - but shared memory still has its uses. Just a point for
all the comparisons to smartphones and what not.

EDIT: just to expand on this a bit, this means that there are workloads that
these old-school supercomputers will run much faster than a modern high-end
desktop. This particularly applies to workloads which have a lot of shared
memory access at random locations - a very difficult case for the modern
systems, which depend on high cache hit rates. Also, the GFLOPS ratings of
these supercomputer processors are in many ways more real than the ratings of
commodity processors, which depend on the pipelines being filled in very
specific ways. So no, you can't replace this system (at least the 32-processor
version) with a smartphone or even a desktop. Which is not to say it would be
cost-effective at 39 million of 1996 dollars.

~~~
gdubs
Could you expand upon the types of applications that benefit from what you
describe? I'm guessing simulations, but would love to hear more details.

~~~
yaakov34
Most simulations can actually be parallelized in such a way that most memory
accesses are local - you can divide the object or system in such a way that
various parts don't communicate with each other too much, and map that to a
cluster computer. But there are some exceptions in which parts of a simulated
system can affect each other remotely. For example, in a lot of nuclear
simulations, particles produced in one part of the system can very quickly
travel to other parts; you have a problem when you have particles in your
system which operate on different time scales, e.g. neutrons, heavy nuclei,
and photons. This is a big reason why the DOE and nuclear laboratories liked
these supercomputer systems.

Another case which I saw personally was a simulation of a part of the visual
cortex of the brain; you had neurons which were connected to their neighbors,
but you also had a bunch of connections to far-away neurons, and the bandwidth
between processors which simulated different parts of the cortex became a
limitation (and the huge supercomputers which had the bandwidth were (a)
expensive, and (b) had relatively slow processors for the number crunching in
each region).

Except in this case, I found that the physical delay which existed on a long
connection between neurons allowed us to buffer the messages and send a
notification about the whole train of impulses, effectively compressing the
data. Together with some other simple changes, the simulation ran 10 to 100
times faster, and could use clusters instead of supercomputers.

In general, there are not _that_ many cases in which you really can't get rid
of the requirement of fast non-local memory access; if there were, these
supercomputers wouldn't have died out. But they were useful in some cases, and
were also good for freeing people from thinking about how to localize their
memory accesses - this speeded up development.

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andrewljohnson
I helped sell a Cray on eBay once, in 2000. I remember offering to let the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center use my eBay account, because I had hundreds
of karma from selling Magic cards.

The coolest part was a decade later, I ran into the guy that bought it... on
Hacker News. And that guy was Steve Blank, who turned out to be a hero of
mine.

<http://steveblank.com/2009/11/19/closure/>

~~~
rm999
>"I'm ecstatic," Blank said. "In 50 years, people are just going to go, 'That
was the pinnacle of military computing. These machines are going to be as
important as the first PC or the first minicomputer.'" ... Regardless of where
the machine ends up, Blank said he plans to keep it in working condition. He
said he was arranging with Cray and the supercomputing center to ship the
machine in a climate-controlled environment.

And then...

>It sat in my barn next to the tractors and manure for five years. I had the
only farm capable of nuclear weapons design. Cray called two years ago and
bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one.

That's kind of sad. But he did help ensure another Cray remained in working
condition, so I guess that's a positive aspect of the story!

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InclinedPlane
For reference, most smartphones made within the last year or so have superior
specs than the Cray T94.

The T94 has a peak theoretical performance of about 8 GFLOPS, 1 gig of ram,
half a meg of L2 cache and an SSD up to 4 gigs in size.

[http://www.craysupercomputers.com/downloads/CrayT94/CrayT94_...](http://www.craysupercomputers.com/downloads/CrayT94/CrayT94_Flyer001.pdf)

Compare this to the Galaxy S III, which has at least 1 GB of ram, 64 GB of
flash storage, up to 8 MB of L2 cache per core (4x), and nearly 20 GFLOPS of
real world performance (on the GPU).

~~~
veemjeem
In 15 years time, someone will sell the Galaxy S III on ebay, and people will
compare it to the mini processor found in their coffee mug.

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jrockway
From Wikipedia:

 _The system chassis weighs ten tons, contains four tons of fluorinert
coolant, and is approximately the shape and size of a very large chest
freezer_

And yet people complain about their mobile phone not being thin enough. It's
amazing how far we've come in only 15 years.

~~~
agumonkey
I can't help my cynicism, at least Crays were useful.

~~~
jrockway
Mobile phones are pretty useful too.

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noelwelsh
I would love to know who is selling this. There are lots of old-looking racing
cars in the background of the photo, suggesting someone with a serious
hoarding instinct and the bankroll to support it!

~~~
DASD
Nice Lotus 56 in the background. This is a turbine-powered vehicle.
Interestingly enough, the seller has some jet engines/turbines for sale as
well.

~~~
jonah
<http://www.avonaero.com/STP%20CAR.htm>

~~~
DASD
Thank you for sharing. Apparently the white car(Howmet) is quite a gem and
also turbine-powered. For those interested in learning more:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_TX>

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DanBC
You can build your own Cray (of a different model) using FPGAs.

(<http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/>)

I think he'd be interested in talking to anyone with Cray documentation or
software.

We have come a long way in a short time. But I do miss the outlandish design
of the Crays, and the blinking lights of Thinking machines. A bunch of racks
just isn't the same.

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MPSimmons
340 volts at 100amps.

Wow, that's...uhh...impressive. I assume most people will just buy it to put
in their lobby as an expensive couch.

 _edit_

I was mistaken. The T94 doesn't have the same floor plan as the XMP.

Perhaps it'll make a good beer dispenser then.

~~~
sliverstorm
Really gives you some context of how far we've come in so little time, eh?

I sometimes find it sad that pieces like this T94 wind up as museum pieces or
conversation pieces, but it's just one of the casualties of our rapid rate of
progression. I mean, the Qualcomm Snapdragons in cell phones are probably more
powerful, and they run off a battery worth a couple thousand mAh.

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js2
Buy and hold; Cray just might buy it back from you in a couple years -
<http://steveblank.com/2009/11/19/closure/>

~~~
unreal37
Unless of course this is the machine Cray was buying parts for, and now
there's no one left that uses them.

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ChuckMcM
That is a bit of history, not as attractive as the X or Y-MP (to my taste) but
still a neat machine. Folks have been comparing it to a smartphone today,
which is inaccurate, it would be better to compare it to the GPU in a smart
phone where the GPU shader engines don't have nearly as rich an instruction
set as the CLUs of the T94. (and the T94 only had 4 CPUs rather than 16 or 32)
But a amazing I/O bandwidth of 8 GBytes second was pretty cool. This thing
would have been capable of an awesome render of most 3D scenes.

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jwr
I like how they posted a photo of the power requirements, just so that there
be no misunderstandings on whether one can plug it in and fire it up.

You better be able to handle the heat dissipation, too :-)

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noonespecial
Look at the design on that thing. It just makes me want to weep when I see a
rack full of "SuperMicro's".

~~~
illamint
And how well-built it is! Look at the construction: all-machined bolts and
panels and stuff. Looks like something you'd find in the avionics bay of a
spaceship. I love how the panels have milled labels, too: "Common Memory",
etc. Looks like it'd sing "Daisy, Daisy" as you opened it up. If I had the
means I'd pick this thing up and put it in my living room in a heartbeat.
Alas.

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axefrog
Any idea how this would compare in power and capability to today's modern
desktop machines?

~~~
InclinedPlane
It compares to smartphones, a modern desktop machine (say, a Core i7 w/ 8 GB
of RAM and a 512 GB SSD) would leave this thing in the dust.

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mmariani
Cool. Here's another rarity. A Ma 128 prototype [1] going for almost US 100k.

[1] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-PROTOTYPE-
MACINTOSH-128k-COMPUT...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-PROTOTYPE-
MACINTOSH-128k-COMPUTER-TWIGGY-5-25-DISK-
DRIVE-1983-APPLE-/160884428656?_trksid=p4340.m2109&_trkparms=aid%3D555001%26algo%3DPW.CURRENT%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D7%26meid%3D2242860493643444920%26pid%3D100010%26prg%3D1004%26rk%3D4%26sd%3D190727913628%26)

~~~
sliverstorm
Asking price is different from market price.

~~~
pan69
Is it? How many of these are currently on the market?

~~~
sliverstorm
Asking price is what you think someone will pay for it.

Market price is what someone will actually pay for it.

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bane
Lots of folks here rightly bring up how this compares to a smartphone. I think
this shows how brutal being in the supercomputer biz is.

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wtracy
Someday I want to see the Hacker Dojo buy an old Cray or IBM mainframe and set
it up for people to run random jobs on. Not for any practical purpose, just so
people can get a feel for what the old systems were like.

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salem
The MoMA should buy it

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angrycoder
I see from Wikipedia that the T94 is the 1-4 processor version. How does this
compare to a current i5/i7 processor?

The 32 processor version cost $39 million.

~~~
anigbrowl
Funnily enough, there's a J932SE computer going for $16k - works, but crashes.
3.2 GFlops. [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cray-J932SE-32-processor-
supercomput...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cray-J932SE-32-processor-
supercomputer-/120987661864?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c2b6d3628)

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blorf
But will it run Crysis?

~~~
frozenport
*Craysis

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jfornear
So cray.

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nathancahill
That shit cray.

