[SunRescue] good news

[DaveMcGuiremcguire at neurotica.com]

On October 2, Stou Sandalski wrote:
> Oh wow... how do you get them? are they expensive?

  Well, like I said, the first one was via eBay.  Then you sorta get
to know the "community", same as with classic machines.

  "Expensive" is such a relative term.  Much more expensive than a used
Sparc2 at thirty bucks, but much cheaper than a brand new Cray at many
millions of dollars.  I only had to live in a cardboard box and eat
cat food for a few months. ;)

  My smaller one is a YMP/EL, which is an older machine (about 1991) and
much slower than something more recent like my J90.  If you can find
one, an YMP/EL can usually be had for less than $10k, sometimes even as
cheap as $5k.  Watch out for shipping costs, though; these machines
tend to be heavy.  They're built like tanks.

  Even an older super like a YMP/EL, though, can still crunch numbers
like there's no tomorrow, even by today's standards.  In current
technology, you'd pretty much need to get your hands on a big beefy
Alpha to get near that level of heavy numeric performance.

  90% of the "advances" in today's mainstream (read: PeeCee) computer
technology aren't due to people building better processors...the Intel
x86 processor design has remained substantially unchanged for
years...performance gains have resulted from pushing clock speeds
through the roof due to improvements in semiconductor fabrication
technologies.  It's still the same dumb old processor design slogging
along tripping over its own feet due to design tradeoffs and questionable
architecture...only it's doing it at a thousand miles per hour today
instead of ten miles per hour a few years ago.  No real *design*
points have changed...it still isn't doing anything any BETTER, just
relying on brute force clock speed hikes to keep it in business.

  As mainstream processor designers rely on semiconductor fabrication
improvements to make their tired designs faster, their processor
design skills fade from lack of use.  Case in point?  One processor in
a Cray YMP/EL (which typically has 4 or 8 processors) clocks in at 133
MFLOPS.  "Sure", you say, "I can beat that with my 400MHz PentiumII!"
and you'd be right.  But the YMP/EL shipped close to ten years ago,
and IS CLOCKED AT ONLY 33MHz!  Why do I need a UHF-clocked crash-prone
processor to reach the same performance that a 33MHz processor did
almost ten years ago?  *I* don't.  I buy real computers on the used
market. :)

  Wow, two rants in one night.  First, the "oppressive wives and
girlfriends SUCK and need to get dumped" rant, now the "clock speed
isn't everything" rant.  What a treat!  How many people will procmail
me to /dev/null after today, I wonder... ;)

> so when can I come over
> to your house and crack passwords on your Crays? Ok yea tomorow's good for
> me too hehehe ; )

  Uh-huh. ;)

> other then Unicos is there an OS that will run on a cray? like NetBSD or
> Linux?

  Nope, just Unicos these days.  They're really not general-purpose
machines, and really would not benefit from general-purpose operating
systems.  The processors and I/O sytems are godlike, but they'd be
useless without the right support from the operating system.  Much of
the real magic lies in the compilers, which have to be smart enough to
generate the *right* code for such an exotic (yet amazingly sensible,
when you look at it) processor design.


              -Dave McGuire