3 ms·
I had the opportunity to use a Cray Y-MP 2E at University, early-90s. Even though this was in Brazil, you had to get special approval from the US Government to
by guiambros 13y ago
I had the opportunity to use a Cray Y-MP 2E at University, early-90s. Even though this was in Brazil, you had to get special approval from the US Government to be able to run your code. I got a free pass as I was limited to 10 mins of CPU time/week. Shell usage didn't count, so 10 mins was plenty of time to play with UNICOS.
It was a beautiful machine. The C-shaped purple machine was impressive, and the refrigeration huge. And we had some nice SGI Indigo workstations as the front-end, so you could optimize your (Forth) code before moving to Cray.
Amazing to think of all that paranoia for 666 Megaflops. My not-so-new Core i7 has 150,000+ Mflops, not counting the GPU.
- kjs3 13y agoI got to use a Y/MP-48 (COS with VAX/VMS front ends) in the late 80s. Excellent learning experience. The professor offered something like 10 bonus points on the final for anyone that could solve a particular problem (don't recall which one) in a faster time than he was able to achieve. Having done the best I could, I called the local Cray office looking for help. It was a sales office, so the person I talked to could only say he'd see what he could do. A couple of days later, they called and asked if I could come to the office for a bit. Turns out, one of the senior compiler engineers was in town, and he took something like 2 hours out of his trip to teach this college kid all the black magic and voodoo compiler switches and optimization techniques that weren't covered in the class. Very generous and great customer service. I ended up about 12% faster than the shocked professor, and got my A.
- guiambros 13y agoLove the story, thanks for sharing it.