20 ms·

Only within a very small domain was this ever reasonable.

• jwr 3y ago
  But that's why there's a "super" in "supercomputers"! Cray loaded a ton of static memory into their computers, then liquid-cooled the whole thing. Sure, the power requirements were through the roof, and you had a whole huge chiller system which you had to run and hope it doesn't fail. If it did fail, you really wanted to shut the machine down fast. From what I recall there was also an emergency propeller inside the back case of the Y-MP 2E, and yes propeller is a much better name for this thing than a "fan". It would delay the inevitable, although dumping those tens of kW of heat into your server room was not something you ever wanted to do. The whole point of all this was that you could do things that you couldn't with "normal" computers. That's why those were called "supercomputers". And I'm so glad that after a hiatus of about 30 years we're getting another wave of exceptional machines, which aren't just bigger PCs.