
From Megaflops to Total Solutions: Cray and Supercomputing History [pdf] - poindontcare
http://ethw.org/images/7/76/Elzen_%26_MacKenzie,_From_Megaflops_to_Total_Solutions.pdf
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trsohmers
If you enjoyed this article, I highly recommend the book "The Supermen: The
story of Seymour Cray and the technical wizards behind the supercomputer". It
goes into a lot of detail regarding ERA before Cray, the creation of CDC
(which is a fantastic start up story regarding how they got funded) along with
a lot of specifics on Seymour and his thinking and development style. Seymour
is my all time hero, and learning extensively about him and his architectures
was what gave me my love of computer architecture and design, with this book
being a fantastic information source.

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pklausler
I worked for Cray Research and its successors for many years, including a
stint at Cray Computer Corporation in Colorado Springs on the Cray-3 project.
I wrote the compiler's optimization and vectorization phase, and this gave me
a chance to interact with Seymour on several questions and problems with the
architecture. It remains a very fond memory.

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simplicio
Probably worth noting that the thesis of the article (that network effects and
buyer lock-in would keep Cray from scumbing to competitors) didn't really pan.
Both Cray founded companies went bankrupt a few years after the article was
published.

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aab0
One lesson I take away is how fragile a single-product company is. Each new
Cray computer had to be either a total or good success, or the company would
die. Like a shark, it had to keep swimming forward, and at Cray-3/4, it lost
momentum and asphyxiated. Which is why now IBM builds so many
supercomputers...

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aab0
(Which is not to take away from Cray's accomplishments. It's not every
engineer, or every industry, where it's possible to decide to increase the
performance of a device by an order of magnitude and _do so_ something like 7
times in a row if you include Cray-3 and Cray-4 which apparently did
physically exist, according to Wikipedia.)

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tcoppi
Should be tagged with a date of 1993, it isn't immediately clear what
timeframe this was published other than after the "late 1980s".

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daveguy
Most recent reference is 1991 with many from 1990. I think it is safe to say
(1991).

Edit: includes an internal reference to "late 1991", so maybe (1992) or (1993)
is more accurate.

Edit2: and you were right (1993). Citation: Boelie Elzen and Donald MacKenzie,
"From Megaflops to Total Solutions: The Changing Dynamics of Competitiveness
in Supercomputing," in Technological Competitiveness: Contemporary and
Historical Perspectives on Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Industries
(Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 1993), 119-151.

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Sephr
Amazing how far we've come. Now you can get 10.6 TFLOPS of FP32 in only 300W
(reference: GP100 in the Nvidia DGX-1).

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tcoppi
It isn't a completely fair comparison, but it is indeed amazing that you can
buy a GPU for < $1000 that would, going by raw FLOPS, by itself be on the
TOP500 in the early 2000s, and we use them to browse facebook and play League
of Legends :)

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TheOtherHobbes
They'll end up in phones and watches eventually, running CNNs for speech
recognition and other useful things.

