Re: NSA spy machine

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Ian F. writes:

> You're talking about silicon fab lines here, Tim.  As far as I am aware, Cray
> has never fab it's own chips.  Indeed, most of their boards which I have
> seen (I, II, Y-MP/8 and Y-MP/EL) have used chips sourced from fairly well-
> known vendors, such as VLSI Technologies.

Yes, of course I was. My point was that the $5-10 M that NSA will put
into to Crayco to keep it on life support for another couple of years
is chump change compared to the investments being made which actually
_will_ alter the economics of things. (And the Pentium is neither here
nor there in this point.)

> > (And a new generation of hackers are using Linux on cheap Pentium
> > boxes to easily outrun Suns.)
> 
> Not a fair comparison, really.  Sun is the bottom end of the RISC system
> market, and is being continually trounced by almost everyone else.  Comparing
> the Pentium to our R4400 chips, or HP's PA, or DEC's Alpha would be much more
> instructive, and not nearly as favorable to Pentium.

My point was that the world is being changed by cheap processors. This
is what will allow VoicePGP to be spread widely, not the fairly slight
performance advantages of R4400s or Alphas.

(There's an interesting thread in the PowerPC and Intel newsgroups
about the performance of a dozen or so machines in running actual
Mathematica code. I'm not trying to start a benchmark debate
here...the point is that PowerMac 8100s were right up near the top, as
were Pentium P90s. The H-P PA machines were the only machines
consistently faster. Alphas often lagged, for various reasons.
Indigos I don't recall the ratings of. The stunner is that machines
people are buying for _home use_ are essentially as fast as the
fastest workstations.)

> Cray's traditional client-base is money rich, and possess problem sets which
> are not practical on conventional architectures.  Those conventional

Crayco has not a sold a single Cray III, which means of course they've
never sold a single machine. Not a single one. Hence the latest
infusion of life support from NSA. (Ian and others of course know
this, but for anyone who is confused: Cray Research and Cray Computer
are two entirely separate companies. Different locales, different
staff. Crayco is developing the Cray III and Cray IV, as we've seen
here. No sales for the Cray III spells dire problems for them.)

> Lots of people disregard the implications of putting quarter of a million ECL
> chips into a column a metre round and a metre and a half high (ie. the Cray
> II).
> You have BIG heat problems, and in some configurations even flourinert
> immersion isn't going to work.
> 
> A lot of the cost of these systems is packaging, and Cray really pushes
> the state of the art here.  In Seymour Cray's speech to the ACM, he mentions
> that fluid immersion of PCB's had never been tried before, as everyone thought

I saw the first Cray 2 running during its shake-down cruise at LLL, in
January 1984. 

As to running boards in Fluorinert, we'd been doing it at Intel since
the late 1970s. We did liquid burn-in of hundreds of chip-filled
boards, at just below the boiling point of the liquid (I think it was
FC-76, but it could've been one of other variants). A lot of people
knew about this, and there was a lot of discussion that I can recall
personally about cooling computers with direct flow Fluorinert. 

(The guy who showed my the Cray 2, Howard Davidson, was already
working on a system involving water at high speeds coursing through
silicon microchannels. Flourinert was rejected as not having enough
kW/cm^2 heat transfer properties.)

I'm not knocking Cray's designs, nor his packaging. Just clarifying
things as I understand them.

I expect to see both Crays eventually go the way of Thinking Machines
and other largely-captive suppliers to the national security
apparatus.


--Tim May


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