5 ms·

I used to program a Y-MP2 around 1990. That had an SSD and was the abolute fastest machine I had ever used at that time.

by IncRnd 6y ago

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> 1990 > SSD Can you elaborate?
- lvh 6y ago
  1990 is probably a little early for something flash-based, but battery-backed DRAM- and CCD-based devices existed before that.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Even Sinclair in the 80s had a prototype for the QL, which didn't go into production: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair%20QL%20Prototype%20Wafer%20Memory%20Expansion/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair%20QL%2...
- IncRnd 6y ago
  It was at the NSCEE (National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment) installation at UNLV for Yucca mountain. There were two vector processors and an amazing 5GB SSD. The OS was UNICOS, a successor of System V and COS (Cray OS), and a user was actually fully swapped out on context switches. The SSD wasn't new by any means. A decade earlier the Cray-1M optionally could have had an SSD.
  - lvh 6y ago
    To be clear, we're talking about battery-backed RAM (specifically MOS RAM) there, right?
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      I don't know how the solid state storage was implemented. There are bunches of Cray brochures on the Internet that might have that information.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        It's not an SSD; they're referring to their main RAM as solid state storage to differentiate it from core memory.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - walrus01 6y ago
      I don't think it was battery backed by anything in the Cray, though I could be wrong. The general idea being that the Cray would be installed in a facility that should have massive whole AC circuit, true online type UPS, and generators backing that up.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      I think they're talking about the (not battery backed) SRAM, that would have been referred to as solid state storage to differentiate it from core memory technology. The gigabytes of SRAM used as main RAM you could stick on a Cray was a key differentiator for the platform (and would be still today).
- martyvis 6y ago
  I guess a RAM drive, where you aren't using mechanical methods for mass storage, can be considered a solid state drive
  - beamatronic 6y ago
    Even the Amiga had a RAM disk
    - makach 6y ago
      RAM disk is the one thing I really miss on PC/Mac
      - nl 6y ago
        You can easily setup a RAM disk on Windows at least. These days with M2 SSDs it isn't really necessary and (as was the case back then) you are usually better off using any spare RAM for programs.
      - lreeves 6y ago
        There are many software tools to give you a RAM disk these days on pretty much all major operating systems - even ones that give you a disk based off of GPU memory!
        Y_Y 6y ago
        Has any of you actually successfully used a ramdisk recently on a modern GPU? The documentation available for doing this in Linux is pretty scarce.
        ithkuil 6y ago
        Amiga had a nice trick called the RAD disk which was a ram disk whose content would be preserve across soft reboot
        mr_toad 6y ago
        I think /dev/shm is available on most(?) Linux systems by default these days. I tend to use it instead of /tmp when I can.
- fentonc 6y ago
  All of the early Cray mainframes (even the Cray-1 discussed here, although maybe only the somewhat later Cray-1/S) supported a "Solid State Disk" peripheral, which was basically a refrigerator full of RAM that was accessible via DMA channel. The intent was to be used to swap in and out large data sets from memory - I think even the early ones went up to a gigabyte in size.
  - neilv 6y ago
    I believe the idea also made its way to microcomputers (or was realized independently) shortly after, like with the SemiDisk: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040756/http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/SemiDisk.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040756/http://www.s100co...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - kens 6y ago
    Yes, the Cray Solid State Storage Device (SSD) was a standalone unit that looked like a quarter of a Cray, complete with bench. It held up to 2 gigabytes of data in MOS memory and was accessed via an I/O channel at 100 megabytes to 1.25 gigabytes per second. It was used for "temporary storage of datasets" and could "significantly increase data transfer rates." The SSD was separate from the Cray's main memory. It is described in detail in the manual: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/Disk/HR-0031_SolidStateStorage_Dec82.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/Disk/HR-0031_SolidStateSto...
    - abiogenesis 6y ago
      > was accessed via an I/O channel at 100 megabytes to 1.25 gigabytes per second. That's even faster than many modern SSDs.
- ardy42 6y ago
  This isn't about a Cray, but it's roughly contemporaneous. According to https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/26062 https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/26062, the Cassini space probe had an "SSD," and the contract to build it was awarded in 1992. It sounds like it was pretty much a RAM disk made from DRAM. I'd imagine it would be practical to build and use something similar for a multi-million dollar supercomputer where cost is secondary to performance.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I have also seen mention of this in spacecraft design discussion. The concept being that for things which are powered from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, it's safe to treat the RAM as storage. Because there's absolutely no scenario after launch, in which the constant trickle of wattage flow from the RTG to the onboard DC distribution buses and computers would ever be interrupted. If the power from the RTG were to ever be cut off it would be a catastrophic mission failure anyways, entirely aside from the power to the onboard computing systems being interrupted.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      Presumably the OS would be in some nonvolatile medium and the SSD would only be used for stuff like storing sensor data anyway. In the event of corruption or a system restart you would lose all of your working data but could bootstrap the system again.
      - ardy42 6y ago
        While it would make sense to have recovery routines in some nonvolatile memory to handle a system corruption use case, I'm not sure it if would be necessary for a system restart. IIRC, core-based systems had nonvolatile RAM, and I think at least some of them would continue to execute the same memory image after reset. I think the point of the GP was that one of these DRAM based recorders is basically nonvolatile for all intents in purposes in this application.
    - heavenlyblue 6y ago
- walrus01 6y ago
  It's my understanding that it wasn't a flash memory based SSD like we would see today, but just a huge amount of RAM (for its era) that could be used as storage. The facilities that typically hosted a Cray could be counted upon to have very reliable power, so the power failure risk of keeping stuff directly in RAM was low.
  - konjin 6y ago
    Rather you always had a back up generator that would let you shut down everything gracefully in the event of a power outage. An uncle that worked in that area in the 80s/90s had stories about people who still argued these new fangled journaling file systems were pointless.
    - KMag 6y ago
      SGI machines had capacitor banks in the power supplies large enough to power the machine long enough for the kernel interrupt handler to park all of the hard drive write heads. It turns out that the voltage required to keep the write head writing is often less than the voltage required to keep RAM from corrupting. At least for a time, XFS journaling correctness relied on the kernel being able to prevent garbage writes on loss of power. There used to be big caveats to using XFS on non-SGI hardware. Though, I think those caveats were roughly "XFS guarantees aren't much better than ext3/ext4 guarantees on power loss, on non-SGI hardware".

I used to program a Y-MP2 around 1990. That had an SSD and was the abolute fastest machine I had ever used at that time.

by IncRnd 6y ago

I used to program a Y-MP2 around 1990. That had an SSD and was the abolute fastest machine I had ever used at that time.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

> 1990 > SSD Can you elaborate?

lvh 6y ago
1990 is probably a little early for something flash-based, but battery-backed DRAM- and CCD-based devices existed before that.
- rleigh 6y ago
  Even Sinclair in the 80s had a prototype for the QL, which didn't go into production: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair%20QL%20Prototype%20Wafer%20Memory%20Expansion/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair%20QL%2...
IncRnd 6y ago
It was at the NSCEE (National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment) installation at UNLV for Yucca mountain. There were two vector processors and an amazing 5GB SSD. The OS was UNICOS, a successor of System V and COS (Cray OS), and a user was actually fully swapped out on context switches. The SSD wasn't new by any means. A decade earlier the Cray-1M optionally could have had an SSD.
- lvh 6y ago
  To be clear, we're talking about battery-backed RAM (specifically MOS RAM) there, right?
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    I don't know how the solid state storage was implemented. There are bunches of Cray brochures on the Internet that might have that information.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      It's not an SSD; they're referring to their main RAM as solid state storage to differentiate it from core memory.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I don't think it was battery backed by anything in the Cray, though I could be wrong. The general idea being that the Cray would be installed in a facility that should have massive whole AC circuit, true online type UPS, and generators backing that up.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I think they're talking about the (not battery backed) SRAM, that would have been referred to as solid state storage to differentiate it from core memory technology. The gigabytes of SRAM used as main RAM you could stick on a Cray was a key differentiator for the platform (and would be still today).
martyvis 6y ago
I guess a RAM drive, where you aren't using mechanical methods for mass storage, can be considered a solid state drive
- beamatronic 6y ago
  Even the Amiga had a RAM disk
  - makach 6y ago
    RAM disk is the one thing I really miss on PC/Mac
    - nl 6y ago
      You can easily setup a RAM disk on Windows at least. These days with M2 SSDs it isn't really necessary and (as was the case back then) you are usually better off using any spare RAM for programs.
    - lreeves 6y ago
      There are many software tools to give you a RAM disk these days on pretty much all major operating systems - even ones that give you a disk based off of GPU memory!
      - Y_Y 6y ago
        Has any of you actually successfully used a ramdisk recently on a modern GPU? The documentation available for doing this in Linux is pretty scarce.
      - ithkuil 6y ago
        Amiga had a nice trick called the RAD disk which was a ram disk whose content would be preserve across soft reboot
      - mr_toad 6y ago
        I think /dev/shm is available on most(?) Linux systems by default these days. I tend to use it instead of /tmp when I can.
fentonc 6y ago
All of the early Cray mainframes (even the Cray-1 discussed here, although maybe only the somewhat later Cray-1/S) supported a "Solid State Disk" peripheral, which was basically a refrigerator full of RAM that was accessible via DMA channel. The intent was to be used to swap in and out large data sets from memory - I think even the early ones went up to a gigabyte in size.
- neilv 6y ago
  I believe the idea also made its way to microcomputers (or was realized independently) shortly after, like with the SemiDisk: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040756/http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/SemiDisk.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040756/http://www.s100co...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kens 6y ago
  Yes, the Cray Solid State Storage Device (SSD) was a standalone unit that looked like a quarter of a Cray, complete with bench. It held up to 2 gigabytes of data in MOS memory and was accessed via an I/O channel at 100 megabytes to 1.25 gigabytes per second. It was used for "temporary storage of datasets" and could "significantly increase data transfer rates." The SSD was separate from the Cray's main memory. It is described in detail in the manual: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/Disk/HR-0031_SolidStateStorage_Dec82.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/Disk/HR-0031_SolidStateSto...
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    > was accessed via an I/O channel at 100 megabytes to 1.25 gigabytes per second. That's even faster than many modern SSDs.
ardy42 6y ago
This isn't about a Cray, but it's roughly contemporaneous. According to https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/26062 https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/26062, the Cassini space probe had an "SSD," and the contract to build it was awarded in 1992. It sounds like it was pretty much a RAM disk made from DRAM. I'd imagine it would be practical to build and use something similar for a multi-million dollar supercomputer where cost is secondary to performance.
- walrus01 6y ago
  I have also seen mention of this in spacecraft design discussion. The concept being that for things which are powered from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, it's safe to treat the RAM as storage. Because there's absolutely no scenario after launch, in which the constant trickle of wattage flow from the RTG to the onboard DC distribution buses and computers would ever be interrupted. If the power from the RTG were to ever be cut off it would be a catastrophic mission failure anyways, entirely aside from the power to the onboard computing systems being interrupted.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Presumably the OS would be in some nonvolatile medium and the SSD would only be used for stuff like storing sensor data anyway. In the event of corruption or a system restart you would lose all of your working data but could bootstrap the system again.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      While it would make sense to have recovery routines in some nonvolatile memory to handle a system corruption use case, I'm not sure it if would be necessary for a system restart. IIRC, core-based systems had nonvolatile RAM, and I think at least some of them would continue to execute the same memory image after reset. I think the point of the GP was that one of these DRAM based recorders is basically nonvolatile for all intents in purposes in this application.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
walrus01 6y ago
It's my understanding that it wasn't a flash memory based SSD like we would see today, but just a huge amount of RAM (for its era) that could be used as storage. The facilities that typically hosted a Cray could be counted upon to have very reliable power, so the power failure risk of keeping stuff directly in RAM was low.
- konjin 6y ago
  Rather you always had a back up generator that would let you shut down everything gracefully in the event of a power outage. An uncle that worked in that area in the 80s/90s had stories about people who still argued these new fangled journaling file systems were pointless.
  - KMag 6y ago
    SGI machines had capacitor banks in the power supplies large enough to power the machine long enough for the kernel interrupt handler to park all of the hard drive write heads. It turns out that the voltage required to keep the write head writing is often less than the voltage required to keep RAM from corrupting. At least for a time, XFS journaling correctness relied on the kernel being able to prevent garbage writes on loss of power. There used to be big caveats to using XFS on non-SGI hardware. Though, I think those caveats were roughly "XFS guarantees aren't much better than ext3/ext4 guarantees on power loss, on non-SGI hardware".