
Seymour Cray and the Development of Supercomputers - benev
http://www.linuxvoice.com/seymour-cray-and-supercomputers/
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gjkood
I remember the days when it was a point of national pride to own a Cray
supercomputer. In the 1980s, India tried to get access to a Cray XMP-24, but
was denied access due to dual use capabilities. Instead, they were only
allowed to purchase the lesser capable XMP-14. The purchase came with the
stipulation of having to host US personnel onsite to monitor the usage of the
supercomputer. This denial/control of access also led to the birth of India's
own supercomputer efforts by CDAC. Many developments in India's space, nuclear
and computing efforts mainly happened due to denial of technology such as
Cryogenic engines, supercomputers etc.

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gjkood
Recommended reading for all Cray fans [http://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-
Technical-Wizards-Sup...](http://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-
Wizards-
Supercomputer/dp/0471048852/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449850907&sr=8-1&keywords=seymour+cray)

~~~
dang
A wonderful book. It's light on technical detail—well, void of it—but covers
the human story and business background well, and the material is so
fascinating, it's hard to believe how fascinating it is. Especially the origin
story, which is like the early history of Silicon Valley in an alternate
universe of the Midwest. People bringing their dogs to work. CDC getting
started by selling stock out of a station wagon. Cray moving his lab further
and further away from the managers. It's all so archetypal, most of all Cray
himself.

A pattern that recurs through the book is that Cray's achievements worked out
best when he collaborated with the much lesser-known Les Davis, who was a
master of organization and execution. A good local newspaper article from
Davis as of a few years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10334470).
I hope someone has gotten a full oral history from Mr. Davis.

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z92
Growing up in the 80s, the Cray 2 was my poster computer. Until the day came
when I realized it was only 800MHz and had 4GB RAM, and my phone was faster
than that.

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agumonkey
I often thought this, but a Cray is not a normal computer. From some comment,
I learned that it had a 8MB L1 cache, meaning it could crunch all of it in one
go, then refill, so on and so forth. It means these little 800MHz were used to
their fullest, while nowadays multicore GHz chip have to wait a lot to get new
data in smaller quantities. Making a Cray still as fast today (for adequate
tasks of course).

So todays processor have higher peak bandwidth, on average, Cray can sustain
larger bandwidth.

ps: [https://archive.is/FWzLF](https://archive.is/FWzLF) read jojomonkeyboy
comment

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TheOtherHobbes
Most of the Gflops in a phone are in the GPU - precisely because it's
massively parallel, like the Cray.

Intel's i7s and Xeons have a more general purpose architecture with much less
parallelism, but still manage a steady few hundred Gflops on Linpack.

~~~
agumonkey
True, I was speaking about the CPUs. Also GPU are still dedicated to graphical
workload on smartphone, or are they used through an opencl-like lib ?

~~~
frozenport
There are programming techniques where you offload all the computation onto
(via OpenGL!) onto the CPU. I did this for image processing where we needed to
do histogram normalization. It was not fun.

But the GFlop numbers given are maybe an order or two of magnitude off from
achieved performance for something like Lapack.

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krylon
One thing that strikes me about Cray's designs is that they look so
extraordinarily cool, but the look of the machines is - according to Wikipedia
- often the result of technical/engineering requirements/decisions. They were
led by technical priorities almost exclusively, yet they came out not only the
fastest computers on earth (at the time), they also looked ... awesome.

~~~
stephengoodwin
I always found it somewhat humorous that Cray invested so much effort into the
look of it's supercomputers, considering very few people would actually see
the inside of a super computing center.

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peter303
Cray 1: 80 MFLOPS and 8 megabytes in 1976. That was the standard for "mini-
supercomputers" in the 1980s.

~~~
kabdib
And subject to ITAR export regulation, as you might imagine.

By the mid 80s, personal computers were starting to get close to these limits
and the US government had to start tweaking the rule's thresholds.

