Re: NSA spy machine

["Ian Farquhar" <ianf@simple.sydney.sgi.com>]

On Aug 18,  7:41pm, John Young wrote:
> The Cray 3 supercomputer, two years late to market when it
> appeared last year, has not yet found a customer, and Cray
> executives said they were pinning their hopes for survival on
> the Cray 4, due to be completed in the first quarter of next
> year."

Don't confuse Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) with Cray Research
Incorporated (CRI).  The former was formed from the later, with a cash grant of
several hundred million dollars and Seymour Cray as head designer.  Prior
to this, the Cray vector range had split into two different streams.
One was the series which went from the Cray I through the X-MP into the
Y-MP series.  They were essentially variations on the same architecture, and
stressed compatibility with previous models.  This range is still aggressively
supported by CRI, which is doing quite well for an exclusively supercomputing
vendor.  They're even learning that the entire world doesn't have multibillion
dollar budgets (hence the EL, EL92 and Jedi models).

The second range began at the Cray I as well, and then went to the Cray II
(designed by SC, still part of CRI at the time).  Then came the split,
and Seymour headed off into CCC, taking his GaAs Cray III project with him,
and CRI stayed with the highly successful [XY]-MP line.

>From what I know of the Cray III, it is a flourinert cooled system about the
size of a small filing cabinet.  It's CPU is manufactured from GaAs, although
the main memory is still silicon.  Because of the signal propogation timings
involved in running with a 2nS clock, they've ground the wafers down to
0.125 mm thick to pack more of them into the same space.  There is a very
interesting ACM talk given by Seymour Cray which details all of this, and it
is widely available on video.  This is not meant with any disrespect to him,
but I was surprised to find that he is a very entertaining speaker.

> A way to keep Cray afloat?  If so, why not Thinking Machines?

Why Thinking Machines over CCC, or even CRI for that matter?  After all
CRI have the rather interesting T3D system.

> Okay by me.  Maybe
> then he can afford to share all his supercomp secrets.

Secret: take lots and lots and lots of money, use the most exotic packaging
technologies you can find, pay lots and lots of attention to your memory
system and cache, don't forget the importance of a nicely balanced
architecture (meaning that I/O does matter), don't forget the importance of
good compilers, and implement bit counting instructions just like the NSA
tells you to.

Hardly a secret, don't you think?

							Ian.

#include <std.disclaimer>  I am not speaking for SGI, folks.