[rescue] Cray J90s

[Dave McGuire]

On June 12, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> Wow, are the J90s really that new?  Oh, well you said that they shipped
> with SS5s as terminals, and they're certainly that new.  It's amazing
> how much computer hardware changes in only 5 years.. 

  The J90 was announced in 1995 and first shipped in 1996.  Not much has
changed architecturally in the supercomputer world since then.  Real
computers evolve more slowly because their evolution scales up more
than just their clock rates.

> >   The sellers *never* know the hardware.  There are but a handful of
> > people around who do, and they're not in the surplus business.
> 
> I'm assuming that this refers to just Cray stuff, right?  I've dealt

  Yes.

> with quite a few people who really know their hardware, but it's not
> anything on the scale of Crays.

  Let's put it this way.  The J90 is now out of production, and it was
the most plentifully produced Cray system.  There were about four
hundred of them built.

         -Dave McGuire