4 ms·

Interesting document. I remember seeing a document before that had been declassified about Cray at some US government agency in the 60s/70s. I think it was NSA.

Interesting document. I remember seeing a document before that had been declassified about Cray at some US government agency in the 60s/70s. I think it was NSA. I'll try to track it down. I'm just thinking it had some technical details redacted...could it be possible that some of the MHz were redacted and were higher than the published 80 MHz figures? Maybe, right? Anyway, also interesting is you both (you and another commenter) used the terms "conspiracy" and "whackadoodle" :) First time I've seen the word whackadoodle, it's a pretty interesting name. And now I'm wondering if it's a common combiner with "conspiracy". Used often? edit: I just looked up the whackadoodle. Turns out it's a noun, too, huh. I see it's more common in the US, maybe that's why I never heard this before :) Reminds me of yankeedoodle (or, seemingly unrelatedly, "wanker", from the whacka - for masturbate, and the doodle for penis. Maybe that's just my Australian transliteration, haha). Anyway, I see the word is so interesting there was a WSJ article[0] on it from 2019. Woosh, straight over my head with that one, heh (was that too much of a 90s phrase?) :) [0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wackadoodle-a-ludicrous-word-for-ludicrous-times-11566575623 https://www.wsj.com/articles/wackadoodle-a-ludicrous-word-fo... - A ludicrous word for ludicrous times.

eesmith 5y ago
Not by an order of magnitude! Surely you've heard of gamers who add special cooling devices so they can overclock the CPU. Increase the frequency and power consumption increases. Decrease the frequency and power consumption decreases. You don't need as much cooling. And those Crays needed special cooling. Quoting Wikipedia for the Cray-1: > each circuit board was paired with a second, placed back to back with a sheet of copper between them. The copper sheet conducted heat to the edges of the cage, where liquid Freon running in stainless steel pipes drew it away to the cooling unit below the machine. The first Cray-1 was delayed six months due to problems in the cooling system Any computer engineer working on a severely underclocked Cray is going to wonder why it has so much unused cooling. From a business sense, think how many more sales you could have without including needlessly exotic Freon cooling that requires developing new welding techniques. > declassified about Cray at some US government agency in the 60s/70s Cray was close to the NSA, yes. That's no secret. The NSA and related agencies funded a lot of supercomputing research. The popcount instruction, implemented in the Cray-1 and other machines, even has the nickname "The NSA Instruction". https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/ https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27470529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27470529 . > ... interesting is you both (you and another commenter) used .. Don't assume independence between commenters. I deliberately quoted Mister_X when I used the term "whackadoodle". Try https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whackadoodle https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whackadoodle . FWIW, the term "whackadoodle" was used in the 1990s: ] (1995) It's been said that you've got to be a real "whackadoodle" to dive those truly deep sites; this book will not encourage anyone to be a "whackadoodle!" - https://archive.org/details/diveontarioguide0000kohl/page/46/mode/2up?q=Whackadoodle https://archive.org/details/diveontarioguide0000kohl/page/46... ] (1990) Ellen Beach Yaw, Maria Galvany, Erna Sack, and Miliza Korjus among others varied in the extent to which they considered an elitist theatre career part of or a mere adjunct to their appeal as whackadoodle artistes. - https://archive.org/details/dementedworldoft00mord/page/32/mode/2up?q=Whackadoodle https://archive.org/details/dementedworldoft00mord/page/32/m... .
- graderjs 5y ago
  The document I remembered is I believe this one: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/01/2002754533/-1/-1/0/6586785-NSA-KEY-ROLE-IN-MAJOR-DEVELOPMENTS-IN-COMPUTER-SCIENCE.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/01/2002754533/-1/-1/0/658... I'm thinking an interesting paragraph is: Already by the early 1960s, automation completely overshadowed : manual processing. Starting in the middle of that decade, NSA began purchasing : commercially developed computers in addition to building its own units. Agency : programmers often wrote specialized software that extended the cryptologic capabilities : of these on-the-shelf systems. The computer of choice was the IBM 7010. NSA also : used the minicomputers PDP-1 and PDP-10 as well as the UNIVAC 490, along with a : software developed at NSA known as RYE. The Honeywell Corporation also developed : the Honeywell 316 to accept manual Morse data from 128 different sources ; simultaneously and record it directly onto magnetic tape. As well, collection systems : even in remote sites became digitally based. Furthermore, computers also allowed for k the collection of a wider variety of signals, including ____________________ By 1968 NSA had over 100 computers, organized in complexes according to the type of processing performed. NSA's five acres of equipment became the largest collection of advanced computers in the United States and probably in the world. Another one is: There were other important computer firsts at NSA. A different supercomputer was developed by the Thinking Machine Corporation. This computer was known as the CM-5, or FROSTBURG. Built at a cost of $25 million, the CM-5 had a storage capacity of 500 gigawords and could perform 65 billion calculations per second. Designed to address higher-mathematics-related questions, FROSTBURG was one of the first true parallel processing computers. Also worth mentioning, when instaJJed the PACE 10 was the first analog desktop computer in use at NSA. This computer required the hand wiring of different panels for each type of mathematical calculation to be performed. Of further note, NSA developed many unique and pioneering software systems and databases, such as SOLIS, which held all NSA electronic product reports. One possible thing that happened is someone maybe translated the compute into layman's terms and in translation the 'flops' and 'MHz' was confused. So 65 billion ops per second in parallel, somehow became a processor with a clock speed of 650 MHz. Maybe there's not much difference between those two measurements: I'm not a supercomputer expert after all, and anyway I'm not definitely saying that's exactly what happened--I still believe they had secret tech way ahead of any documented in declassified releases--but it's one possibility. Ultimately, this thread was probably only going to be about speculating. Without any multiply corroborated first-hand information, most people can't say for sure one way ro the other. Thank you for that mildly interesting comment and those links. I appreciate the 90s refs! :) I think your reasoning about the economics, and business are definitely solid. But that would have to assume that such an advance was an actual product line known to the Cray business in general, and not a special compartmentalized project developed in secret. The latter case I don't think overarching business drivers would have much impact because of the veil of secrecy, and they wouldn't be, by definition, strapped for cash for such a project anyway. Ah, so you copied the other commenter! Hah :) Interesting. Whackadoodle is such a popular word that you're copying someone using it, and I never heard of it. I was going to search UB but I thought their descriptions are a little extreme, seems like it in this case too. Anyway, this is not the fun discussion of possible future tech breakthroughs that I'd hoped to encourage here, but what the hell let's roll with it. Anyway, what I really wanted to see here was lovely speculations about what possible things could they have had, how far they could have been ahead! Maybe next time! :)

eesmith 5y ago

Not by an order of magnitude! Surely you've heard of gamers who add special cooling devices so they can overclock the CPU. Increase the frequency and power consumption increases. Decrease the frequency and power consumption decreases. You don't need as much cooling. And those Crays needed special cooling. Quoting Wikipedia for the Cray-1: > each circuit board was paired with a second, placed back to back with a sheet of copper between them. The copper sheet conducted heat to the edges of the cage, where liquid Freon running in stainless steel pipes drew it away to the cooling unit below the machine. The first Cray-1 was delayed six months due to problems in the cooling system Any computer engineer working on a severely underclocked Cray is going to wonder why it has so much unused cooling. From a business sense, think how many more sales you could have without including needlessly exotic Freon cooling that requires developing new welding techniques. > declassified about Cray at some US government agency in the 60s/70s Cray was close to the NSA, yes. That's no secret. The NSA and related agencies funded a lot of supercomputing research. The popcount instruction, implemented in the Cray-1 and other machines, even has the nickname "The NSA Instruction". https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/ https://vaibhavsagar.com/blog/2019/09/08/popcount/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27470529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27470529 . > ... interesting is you both (you and another commenter) used .. Don't assume independence between commenters. I deliberately quoted Mister_X when I used the term "whackadoodle". Try https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whackadoodle https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whackadoodle . FWIW, the term "whackadoodle" was used in the 1990s: ] (1995) It's been said that you've got to be a real "whackadoodle" to dive those truly deep sites; this book will not encourage anyone to be a "whackadoodle!" - https://archive.org/details/diveontarioguide0000kohl/page/46/mode/2up?q=Whackadoodle https://archive.org/details/diveontarioguide0000kohl/page/46... ] (1990) Ellen Beach Yaw, Maria Galvany, Erna Sack, and Miliza Korjus among others varied in the extent to which they considered an elitist theatre career part of or a mere adjunct to their appeal as whackadoodle artistes. - https://archive.org/details/dementedworldoft00mord/page/32/mode/2up?q=Whackadoodle https://archive.org/details/dementedworldoft00mord/page/32/m... .

graderjs 5y ago
The document I remembered is I believe this one: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/01/2002754533/-1/-1/0/6586785-NSA-KEY-ROLE-IN-MAJOR-DEVELOPMENTS-IN-COMPUTER-SCIENCE.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/01/2002754533/-1/-1/0/658... I'm thinking an interesting paragraph is: Already by the early 1960s, automation completely overshadowed : manual processing. Starting in the middle of that decade, NSA began purchasing : commercially developed computers in addition to building its own units. Agency : programmers often wrote specialized software that extended the cryptologic capabilities : of these on-the-shelf systems. The computer of choice was the IBM 7010. NSA also : used the minicomputers PDP-1 and PDP-10 as well as the UNIVAC 490, along with a : software developed at NSA known as RYE. The Honeywell Corporation also developed : the Honeywell 316 to accept manual Morse data from 128 different sources ; simultaneously and record it directly onto magnetic tape. As well, collection systems : even in remote sites became digitally based. Furthermore, computers also allowed for k the collection of a wider variety of signals, including ____________________ By 1968 NSA had over 100 computers, organized in complexes according to the type of processing performed. NSA's five acres of equipment became the largest collection of advanced computers in the United States and probably in the world. Another one is: There were other important computer firsts at NSA. A different supercomputer was developed by the Thinking Machine Corporation. This computer was known as the CM-5, or FROSTBURG. Built at a cost of $25 million, the CM-5 had a storage capacity of 500 gigawords and could perform 65 billion calculations per second. Designed to address higher-mathematics-related questions, FROSTBURG was one of the first true parallel processing computers. Also worth mentioning, when instaJJed the PACE 10 was the first analog desktop computer in use at NSA. This computer required the hand wiring of different panels for each type of mathematical calculation to be performed. Of further note, NSA developed many unique and pioneering software systems and databases, such as SOLIS, which held all NSA electronic product reports. One possible thing that happened is someone maybe translated the compute into layman's terms and in translation the 'flops' and 'MHz' was confused. So 65 billion ops per second in parallel, somehow became a processor with a clock speed of 650 MHz. Maybe there's not much difference between those two measurements: I'm not a supercomputer expert after all, and anyway I'm not definitely saying that's exactly what happened--I still believe they had secret tech way ahead of any documented in declassified releases--but it's one possibility. Ultimately, this thread was probably only going to be about speculating. Without any multiply corroborated first-hand information, most people can't say for sure one way ro the other. Thank you for that mildly interesting comment and those links. I appreciate the 90s refs! :) I think your reasoning about the economics, and business are definitely solid. But that would have to assume that such an advance was an actual product line known to the Cray business in general, and not a special compartmentalized project developed in secret. The latter case I don't think overarching business drivers would have much impact because of the veil of secrecy, and they wouldn't be, by definition, strapped for cash for such a project anyway. Ah, so you copied the other commenter! Hah :) Interesting. Whackadoodle is such a popular word that you're copying someone using it, and I never heard of it. I was going to search UB but I thought their descriptions are a little extreme, seems like it in this case too. Anyway, this is not the fun discussion of possible future tech breakthroughs that I'd hoped to encourage here, but what the hell let's roll with it. Anyway, what I really wanted to see here was lovely speculations about what possible things could they have had, how far they could have been ahead! Maybe next time! :)