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Cray Announces New, AI-Focused Supercomputers
- CocoaGeek 9y agoWait, Cray is still around?
- sgift 9y agoMore or less - from Wikipedia: The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray.[8] Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation (CCC), in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995, while Cray Research was bought by SGI the next year. Cray Inc. was formed in 2000 when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI and adopted the name of its acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray
- beaconstudios 9y agoI always thought they were named after the Cray twins. Not sure why.
- qubex 9y agoYou'd never heard of supercomputing legend Seymour Cray?! I find that really hard to believe.
- sgift 9y agoOn the other hand, I hadn't heard of the Cray twins before. Each day we learn something new.
- _asummers 9y agoThat's partly because they're the Kray twins, though I had never heard of them before, either. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins
- castis 9y agoCan you explain why this concept is difficult for you to believe?
- qubex 9y agoBecause this is Hacker News and there's so few superstar supercomputer architects (Seymour Cray, Steve Chen, Daniel Hillis) that it should be possible to recite their life stories off the top of one's head.
- castis 9y agoI've never heard of Steve Chen or Daniel Hills and I've been involved for about 15 years. It's absurd to expect everyone here to hold the same knowledge of the world as you.
- throwfast1 9y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
- qubex 9y agoI wasn't making fun of him. I genuinely thought he was joking.
- DonHopkins 9y agoThat's Cray Cray!
- teddyh 9y agoFrom 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6284886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6284886
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pinewurst 9y agoIt's more a brand name at this point - like "Westinghouse" items sold at Target.
- jwr 9y agoNo, not quite — their interconnects are very impressive. It's true that they don't make CPUs anymore, but that stopped making sense a long time ago. If you want to be a supercomputer company these days the value is in the interconnect and software.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wmf 9y agoBut most Cray systems, like the ones in this article, don't use Cray interconnects.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jabl 9y agoCray sold their interconnect IP to Intel a few years ago. But yeah, Aries is impressive.
- inopinatus 9y agoSurely also in the cooling systems. I remember on my visits to the Edinburgh supercomputing center, the quip was that Cray were a refrigeration company first. Like Tesla is a battery manufacturer.
- gbrown_ 9y agoThat will have been for HECToR, an old XE system. They use the ECOphlex system which is a liquid evaporative phase-change cooling system using tetrafluoroethane. The current XC line of supercomputers from Cray utilize more conventional cooling methods.
- tormeh 9y agoYes. They even have their own programming language for super-computing: http://chapel.cray.com/ http://chapel.cray.com/
- skynetv2 9y agoCray is still the #1 supercomputer provider for US & bunch of other countries.
- DonHopkins 9y agoIf they would just go back to their roots and make round sofas, I would buy one.
- gumby 9y agoPioneers in seat heaters to warm your cold butt!
- rburhum 9y agothese two guys have been at the SV Computer History Museum :)
- DonHopkins 9y agoI posted this before, but it's worth repeating: I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray supercomputer, in a computer room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through. Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the Cray, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a relieved expression on his face.
- gumby 9y agoThe funny thing is these two guys (Don and I) have known each other via the arpanet since the 1970s. Just a pair of old farts. I have indeed been to, and spoken at, the CHM, and I have also been in meetings in that very building when it was still SGI HQ. But I based my comment on having programmed the Cray XMP and YMP at NASA Ames next door to where the CHM is. They were in the "upstairs" machine room in building 262. Officially I have no idea what was in the "downstairs" machine room :-).
- coleca 9y agoCool looking server rack doors. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a designer at IBM Raleigh. He showed me models of some of the server rack designs that he worked on at IBM for their super computers (I think it was Blue Gene). He said they had a bunch of CIOs that were upset after having spent ungodly sums of money on a fancy new IBM supercomputer and seeing it look just like all the other miscellaneous racks of servers in their datacenter when they went on a tour. So to appease these CIOs, they created all kinds of designs on the rack doors that looked like DNA sequences on the server doors so that you could 'tell' this cluster was doing gene sequencing just by looking at it and the CIO could proudly show off his new toy.
- crwalker 9y agoCommunicating functionality is just as important as functionality.
- spitfire 9y agoSGI used to have super cool systems like this. You knew you were getting $40K worth of value because your workstation looked like it was worth $40K. Look up SGI O2, Octane, Indy, etc. Similar in the servers with the Onyx and Origin servers. They looked like you had gotten your moneys worth. And at the time, you did.
- mturmon 9y agoThe SGI kit definitely had looks that were a notch above the competing workstations of the time: http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2015/2/18_The_evolution_of_the_power_workstation_files/powerworkstations-1990s.jpg http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2015/2/...
- mbreese 9y agoYeah, the O2 and Octane looked great, but their cases felt like cheap plastic up close. I remember being very unimpressed with my first exposure to an SGI workstation because of this. Actually working on it was great... it was just that the cheap plastic of the case ruined the entire effect.
- lowglow 9y agoHonest question: What makes this super?
- pinewurst 9y agoNothing in particular - this is an announcement of two server nodes revised to support the latest (but still Pascal) GPUs (8 or 10 if lower power is ok). You can pile them up and connect them with Infiniband or OmniPath if you want to build a cluster, the same as with other comparable servers.
- pdq 9y agoThe price.
- FireBeyond 9y agoExactly, it's pretty much identical to Nvidia's own DGX-1 (actually, the DGX-1 will be faster, because it's now using the Volta GPUs, a generation ahead of Pascal): 2 x E5-2698 v3, 512GB memory, 4 x 2TB SSD, 100GB Infiniband, and 8 x P100 (or Volta). $129,000. https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/11/14/nvidias-saturn-v-dgx-1-cluster-stacks/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/11/14/nvidias-saturn-v-dgx...
- lowglow 9y agoYeah, I'm not sure why I would compete with Nvidia on their own turf unless I could do something bigger/better, but Nvidia will always have the advantage of information.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Sephr 9y agoThe Nvidia Tesla V100 is out now, and it's 12x faster for inferencing than the Tesla P100 cards in this. If the Tesla V100 is priced at all similarly to the P100, you would have to be very incompetent and far abstracted from actual devops to consider purchasing one of these computers for your company's AI and deep learning needs.