5 ms·

First USGS supercomputer decommissioning makes way for successors

66 points by keepamovin 2y ago

rbanffy 2y ago
I really miss the cool-looking computers of the Seymour Cray and Thinking Machines era. The SGI moiré cabinet doors were gorgeous as well.
- anotherhue 2y ago
  Hard to pack those circular cray machines together though. And people would keep sitting on them. Check out the Paul Allen auction https://www.christies.com/en/stories/paul-allen-computer-collection-d946162ef5744d7bb43c4459733bf9cf https://www.christies.com/en/stories/paul-allen-computer-col...
  - smegger001 2y ago
    to be fair it does look like a bench seat
    - sjm-lbm 2y ago
      Wait, serious question: was it not a bench seat? I've always assumed it was, and a quick Google finds several places claiming they were bench seats, though none of them terribly authoritative.
      - datameta 2y ago
        The "bench" exterior was an aesthetically minded comfortable seat, but inside was much of the cooling system.
        ForOldHack 2y ago
        Filled with that ... coolant. Pics or it didn't happen? The Bench: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#/media/File:Cray-1-p1010237.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#/media/File:Cray-1-p101...
      - kjs3 2y ago
        Yes, you can sit on them. I have.
      - creer 2y ago
        Perfectly functional as a seat.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    You don't want to pack them too tight for heating/cooling reasons; it was never intended to be 'compact'. Plus, you'd loose the cool factor of having a Cray in your datacenter to show off to visitors.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > Cray in your datacenter You’ll want it next to your lobby, in the “computer aquarium”.
  - ck2 2y ago
    Ah it's got the Altair 8800 ! Cray was fascinating but the Altair changed everything and I'd oddly rather play with a working Altair in a museum than a Cray https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/micro_memories_200301 https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/micro_memories_20... https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_0103_Driscoll_P4050310-V2.jpg https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_0103_Driscoll_P4...
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      You can play with mine. docker run -p 8823:8823 rbanffy/altair-mpm
  - jasomill 2y ago
    Given its historical importance and rarity, $5,000–$8,000 for a working Alto seems like a bargain. Somebody who cares as much as I do, please buy this!
- zitterbewegung 2y ago
  For the Cray 1 seats and design were an aesthetic / engineering solution. It had to dissipate and have so much power that the seats are basically the power supply. I also like that aesthetic it feels like you could discuss your problems there. Now power and rack units are somewhat standardized. Cooling can somewhat differ in that it could use liquid cooling but most use air .
  - datameta 2y ago
    And the reason for a circular design is so that the wire lengths could all be under 4 feet in order to achieve actual projected clock rates. I saw the thing in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Highly highly recommend the museum to every HN user. I went through it twice, first with the greybeard volunteer guide, and then looped in by myself straightaway.
    - Y_Y 2y ago
      To offer a second opinion, the Cray-1 was the only thing I found cool about the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It was otherwise just a like a big website, the history was all dead. In contrast the National Museum of Computing next to Bletchley Had lots of computers turned on, with enthusiast volunteers demonstrating and explaining things. You could punch paper tape and feed it to the Dekatron and see the memory changing as the program ran, or poke at magnetic core memory sheets and someone was right there to discuss all the old tech.
      - creer 2y ago
        I do miss the old "visible storage" Computer History Museum - where you could walk around and peek into so many great machines. The current version has been musee-ified to death. It might safer from flocks of school kids but a real shame for the rest of us.
        rbanffy 2y ago
        They have very strict policies around powering up their devices. I tried to persuade them to look into the original IBM 2260 terminal font design (it is implemented as core memory with missing cores for bits and it resided in the terminal controller). Of course they said no.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  Yeah. And to me nothing beats the Thinking Machine's CM-2, here pictured at the MoMA: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MoMA_Exhibition,_CM-2_%2838801396912%29.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MoMA_Exhibition,_CM-...
  - ForOldHack 2y ago
    That was cool, but there was also a TM @ Pampadu in Paris, and the one at The Army... whew! https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5/corestore/cm5-2.jpg https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5/corestore/cm5-2.jpg
  - ForOldHack 2y ago
    The perfect modern machine for a 'Das blinken lights' notice.
- grkvlt 2y ago
  Have a look at MareNostrum [0] then. It's in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in an old de-consecrated church, and looks awesome! 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomputer_at_Barcelona_Supercomputing_Center_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomput...
AstroJetson 2y ago
Where do these end up? I'm sure there are some places that would be thrilled to get this. Or is the tech so old that it's not viable for research?
- c0balt 2y ago
  ime, They usually get sold, either as full packages or per rack. There are refurbishers who tend to handle the piecewise extraction of all worthwhile components. See also, the recent auctions of Cheyenne They aren't usually re-used as full compute racks because the infra required (cooling, power) is non trivial.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think “not viable for research” is not a thing, haha. At least, if the ratio of compute to communication is right, we can test our algorithms on old hardware using smaller problems. Edit: The SuiteSparse collection (formerly UF matrix collection) is really great for this. You can download matrices with their year and some context about their application. The ones smart people were trying to figure out how to solve 20 years ago on clusters. And then you can marvel at how your laptop smashes them using PARDISO or some other direct sparse solver. Or you can try to figure out a clever way to solve them with 10 year old hardware.
- wil421 2y ago
  If my local Craigslist is any indicator the parts will be stripped down and resold. There were some very cool and very expensive, when new, SGI machines I found on my local Craigslist page. I quickly closed the browser tab when I found out about the power requirements and noise. These computers will probably not make it to CL but eBay and niche auctions might sell them.
- jabl 2y ago
  For the past couple of decades at least, supercomputers are decommissioned when newer HW becomes so much more power efficient that it's cheaper to buy new hardware than keeping the old one running. Usually that lifespan is in the range of five years or so. Of course, if you have free power (or say, the power bill is paid by a different department), sure go wild and keep that old darling running.
kragen 2y ago
i'm surprised the usgs didn't have any supercomputers in the 70s
- shagie 2y ago
  Consider the top super computers back at the start of Top500 - https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/1993/06/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/1993/06/ ... which are nearly all various configurations of a CM-5 or Cray/HPE. I am still amazed at how far we've come. A Raspberry Pi5 is 31.4 Gflops at 8.6W ( https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.htm... ). That would have put it on the first page 1993. (aside: my favorite entry on there is still https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ )
  - kragen 2y ago
    agreed; i wrote the beowulf faq in the late 90s (cf. https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/beowulf_book/beowulf_book.pdf#page=29 https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/beowulf_book/beowu...) apple really screwed over the virginia tech folks
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  They probably borrowed time on NASAs SGI Cray3. They do a lot of geo-modeling, the oil companies also do that.
vzaliva 2y ago
Denali bears huge Cray logo on top. Is it produced by Cray? What are the specs?
- currymj 2y ago
  the corporate descendants of Cray, now owned by HPE, still win the contracts to build a lot of supercomputers. but it's not like the days of Seymour Cray himself, hand-designing every aspect of the system. They use off-the-shelf parts mainly, it's essentially building out a highly-specialized datacenter. the main technology that Cray contributes is the specialized interconnect.

66 points by keepamovin 2y ago

I really miss the cool-looking computers of the Seymour Cray and Thinking Machines era. The SGI moiré cabinet doors were gorgeous as well.

anotherhue 2y ago
Hard to pack those circular cray machines together though. And people would keep sitting on them. Check out the Paul Allen auction https://www.christies.com/en/stories/paul-allen-computer-collection-d946162ef5744d7bb43c4459733bf9cf https://www.christies.com/en/stories/paul-allen-computer-col...
- smegger001 2y ago
  to be fair it does look like a bench seat
  - sjm-lbm 2y ago
    Wait, serious question: was it not a bench seat? I've always assumed it was, and a quick Google finds several places claiming they were bench seats, though none of them terribly authoritative.
    - datameta 2y ago
      The "bench" exterior was an aesthetically minded comfortable seat, but inside was much of the cooling system.
      - ForOldHack 2y ago
        Filled with that ... coolant. Pics or it didn't happen? The Bench: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#/media/File:Cray-1-p1010237.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#/media/File:Cray-1-p101...
    - kjs3 2y ago
      Yes, you can sit on them. I have.
    - creer 2y ago
      Perfectly functional as a seat.
- kjs3 2y ago
  You don't want to pack them too tight for heating/cooling reasons; it was never intended to be 'compact'. Plus, you'd loose the cool factor of having a Cray in your datacenter to show off to visitors.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > Cray in your datacenter You’ll want it next to your lobby, in the “computer aquarium”.
- ck2 2y ago
  Ah it's got the Altair 8800 ! Cray was fascinating but the Altair changed everything and I'd oddly rather play with a working Altair in a museum than a Cray https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/micro_memories_200301 https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/micro_memories_20... https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_0103_Driscoll_P4050310-V2.jpg https://www.nutsvolts.com/uploads/wygwam/NV_0103_Driscoll_P4...
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    You can play with mine. docker run -p 8823:8823 rbanffy/altair-mpm
- jasomill 2y ago
  Given its historical importance and rarity, $5,000–$8,000 for a working Alto seems like a bargain. Somebody who cares as much as I do, please buy this!
zitterbewegung 2y ago
For the Cray 1 seats and design were an aesthetic / engineering solution. It had to dissipate and have so much power that the seats are basically the power supply. I also like that aesthetic it feels like you could discuss your problems there. Now power and rack units are somewhat standardized. Cooling can somewhat differ in that it could use liquid cooling but most use air .
- datameta 2y ago
  And the reason for a circular design is so that the wire lengths could all be under 4 feet in order to achieve actual projected clock rates. I saw the thing in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Highly highly recommend the museum to every HN user. I went through it twice, first with the greybeard volunteer guide, and then looped in by myself straightaway.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    To offer a second opinion, the Cray-1 was the only thing I found cool about the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It was otherwise just a like a big website, the history was all dead. In contrast the National Museum of Computing next to Bletchley Had lots of computers turned on, with enthusiast volunteers demonstrating and explaining things. You could punch paper tape and feed it to the Dekatron and see the memory changing as the program ran, or poke at magnetic core memory sheets and someone was right there to discuss all the old tech.
    - creer 2y ago
      I do miss the old "visible storage" Computer History Museum - where you could walk around and peek into so many great machines. The current version has been musee-ified to death. It might safer from flocks of school kids but a real shame for the rest of us.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        They have very strict policies around powering up their devices. I tried to persuade them to look into the original IBM 2260 terminal font design (it is implemented as core memory with missing cores for bits and it resided in the terminal controller). Of course they said no.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
Yeah. And to me nothing beats the Thinking Machine's CM-2, here pictured at the MoMA: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MoMA_Exhibition,_CM-2_%2838801396912%29.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MoMA_Exhibition,_CM-...
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  That was cool, but there was also a TM @ Pampadu in Paris, and the one at The Army... whew! https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5/corestore/cm5-2.jpg https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5/corestore/cm5-2.jpg
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  The perfect modern machine for a 'Das blinken lights' notice.
grkvlt 2y ago
Have a look at MareNostrum [0] then. It's in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in an old de-consecrated church, and looks awesome! 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomputer_at_Barcelona_Supercomputing_Center_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomput...

AstroJetson 2y ago

Where do these end up? I'm sure there are some places that would be thrilled to get this. Or is the tech so old that it's not viable for research?

c0balt 2y ago
ime, They usually get sold, either as full packages or per rack. There are refurbishers who tend to handle the piecewise extraction of all worthwhile components. See also, the recent auctions of Cheyenne They aren't usually re-used as full compute racks because the infra required (cooling, power) is non trivial.
bee_rider 2y ago
I think “not viable for research” is not a thing, haha. At least, if the ratio of compute to communication is right, we can test our algorithms on old hardware using smaller problems. Edit: The SuiteSparse collection (formerly UF matrix collection) is really great for this. You can download matrices with their year and some context about their application. The ones smart people were trying to figure out how to solve 20 years ago on clusters. And then you can marvel at how your laptop smashes them using PARDISO or some other direct sparse solver. Or you can try to figure out a clever way to solve them with 10 year old hardware.
wil421 2y ago
If my local Craigslist is any indicator the parts will be stripped down and resold. There were some very cool and very expensive, when new, SGI machines I found on my local Craigslist page. I quickly closed the browser tab when I found out about the power requirements and noise. These computers will probably not make it to CL but eBay and niche auctions might sell them.
jabl 2y ago
For the past couple of decades at least, supercomputers are decommissioned when newer HW becomes so much more power efficient that it's cheaper to buy new hardware than keeping the old one running. Usually that lifespan is in the range of five years or so. Of course, if you have free power (or say, the power bill is paid by a different department), sure go wild and keep that old darling running.

kragen 2y ago

i'm surprised the usgs didn't have any supercomputers in the 70s

shagie 2y ago
Consider the top super computers back at the start of Top500 - https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/1993/06/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/1993/06/ ... which are nearly all various configurations of a CM-5 or Cray/HPE. I am still amazed at how far we've come. A Raspberry Pi5 is 31.4 Gflops at 8.6W ( https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.htm... ). That would have put it on the first page 1993. (aside: my favorite entry on there is still https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ )
- kragen 2y ago
  agreed; i wrote the beowulf faq in the late 90s (cf. https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/beowulf_book/beowulf_book.pdf#page=29 https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/beowulf_book/beowu...) apple really screwed over the virginia tech folks
ForOldHack 2y ago
They probably borrowed time on NASAs SGI Cray3. They do a lot of geo-modeling, the oil companies also do that.

vzaliva 2y ago

Denali bears huge Cray logo on top. Is it produced by Cray? What are the specs?

currymj 2y ago
the corporate descendants of Cray, now owned by HPE, still win the contracts to build a lot of supercomputers. but it's not like the days of Seymour Cray himself, hand-designing every aspect of the system. They use off-the-shelf parts mainly, it's essentially building out a highly-specialized datacenter. the main technology that Cray contributes is the specialized interconnect.