[rescue] Cray J90s

[Dave McGuire]

On Monday, August 19, 2002, at 08:09 PM, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
>>> trashed, I mean, would you sink 3000$ into an untested surplus 
>>> machine which
>>> looks like its been beaten around quite a fair bit?  I dunno,  I 
>>> think in
>>
>>   Are you KIDDING ME?  In a heartbeat.  We're talking about a
>> 3-5 year old machine with a price tag of just short of a million
>> bucks.  You don't need a supercomputer to do THAT math.
>
> 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, shipped in 1996, and discontinued in 
(I think) 1999.  This is a *very* short lifespan for a supercomputer, 
which was even more unusual because they "breathed new life" into them 
with the J90SE (Scalar Enhanced...better scalar performance) in the 
middle of the product lifetime.  The base price at introduction on a 
uniprocessor machine with no real disk was around $300K, while most 
useful configurations ran around $1.4-1.6M.

   As I missed the first part of this thread, what are the hardware 
changes you're referring to?

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

   Not meaning to butt into someone else's conversation here, but I have 
to say that I've done a *LOT* of business with surplus dealers...and 
they rarely, if ever, know the first thing about any hardware, Cray or 
otherwise.  If you've run into ones that do, keep in touch with 
them...'cause they're rare!

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                  "I'm willing to sacrifice my ass for the 
sake
St. Petersburg, FL                      of good food."    -Kurt Huhn