I once interned at a Navy lab that worked on what amounted to ray-tracing in non-visible and radio spectrum. They had just bought a ~$2M Convex C3800 vector sup

I once interned at a Navy lab that worked on what amounted to ray-tracing in non-visible and radio spectrum. They had just bought a ~$2M Convex C3800 vector supercomputer and I had to benchmark it with the Lawrence Livermore Loops - a set of benchmarks of varying vectorizability. I also somehow lucked into having a SGI $50k Indigo2 as my desktop because no one else there wanted it. It was bought for visualizations that no one worked on. So I built and ran the LLL there too. Well, our team's code was about 75-80% vectorizable, and on the similar LLL benchmarks the Indigo2 just crushed the Convex. The Convex didn't start winning until loops were >90% vectorizable. People were pissed, but that led to a lot of SGIs being bought.