
A Software Fix May Revitalize the Supercomputer (1995) - rbanffy
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/05/business/a-software-fix-may-revitalize-the-supercomputer.html?pagewanted=all
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dekhn
The Tera was not a success. I remember people trying to get me to use it for
graph problems, but it didn't really provide anything I couldn't do with a
regular computer at the time.

~~~
prestonbriggs
Yeah, lots of people didn't try. What it provided was a way to get over 90%
utilization of the processors (every processor issuing useful instructions
most every clock tick) without worrying about cache misses. So relatively
simple code, useful tools, and high performance. But if you didn't care about
any of that, then it didn't provide much.

~~~
dekhn
I'm familiar with how the architecture was designed, and if I had chosen,
could have ported code. However, like I said, it didn't really perform any
faster than a PC of the time on any code (even ones optimized for the
platform). Writing massively multithreaded code, maintaining it, tuning it,
and then keeping an entire separate platform for something that isn't
measurably faster for a wide range of problems is a huge cost/burden to
developers.

I certainly cared about performance but like most people we found that general
purpose computers that ran all our codes quickly were not a cost/burden to
developers.

~~~
prestonbriggs
I found lots of things that ran much faster on the Tera than on a PC. But yes,
if you are happy with the performance of a general-purpose machine, then
there's little reason to take on a super. Machine-room requirements alone
would finance a lot of off-the-shelf hardware.

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_kst_
We had a Tera MTA (serial #2, IIRC) at SDSC when I worked there. It looked
really cool, but I never got to use it.

Tera bought Cray Research in 2000 and renamed itself to Cray, Inc.

~~~
linksnapzz
(Hi Keith!)

The article is from before they got their funding, the system (well, you know
what it looked like, but for the rest of HN) looked like this:

[https://goo.gl/images/cPJQ89](https://goo.gl/images/cPJQ89)

It was more than 2m tall at the top, but the actual computer bits underneath
the MTA "wave" case were smaller than people might think. I want to say it was
a cube-shaped machined frame holding the CPUs/Memory/IO bits, maybe 3'x3'? I
remember there being a smoke detector, what seemed to be a regular household
unit, on the inside of the case...

IIRC, it was liquid-cooled w/ Fluorinert, and the cpus were on some custom
GaAs process...I had to swap the control workstation for it at one point, and
to make sure that the serial connection to it was still good I watched over
Victor H.'s shoulder as he tipped in. While it was at SDSC, the Tera MTA ran a
Tera-customized FreeBSD 3.3 OS.

Good times...

