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The Rise and Fall of the Cray Supercomputer - for you tech nerds

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Posted on July 26, 2024 at 09:47:34
AbeCollins
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Concise 30-minute video on Cray:







View YouTube Video

I was working for Silicon Graphics in Mountain View when SGI acquired Cray.


Cray is now part of Hewlett-Packard.


Ironically, this was Silicon Graphics HQ on Shoreline Blvd in Mountain View, CA where I had my office 1991 - 1995.






"Since 2002, the Museum has been housed in the former Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) headquarters and executive briefing center. The project's architectural and design changes escalate the award-winning building's original drama by intersecting its historic use with immersive contemporary spaces that highlight the world's largest collection of over 100,000 computing artifacts and ephemera. "

Shoreline Amphitheatre was just a short walk north where I saw the Grateful Dead and others a couple times after work. No parking issues. Leave the car at work and walk to concerts.



 

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RE: The Rise and Fall of the Cray Supercomputer - for you tech nerds, posted on July 26, 2024 at 10:38:06
G Squared
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 Great place - I visited the museum during an IEEE meeting that was held at Synopsis. It brought back memories of testing power supplies that were going into supercomputers.
Gsquared

 

Asianometry - that's a great show!, posted on July 26, 2024 at 13:06:27
Chris from Lafayette
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 I watch every episode I can, even when my understanding is sometimes limited! I just watched their overview of the Yugo (as Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night used to call it, "the zenith of Serbo-Croatian technology"!) last night. Very interesting overview of the problems which arose trying to get a successful, internationally competitive concern going in the semi-independent communist state at that time (i.e., the 50's through the early 90's).

 

When my wife graduated pharmacy school in 1989, posted on July 26, 2024 at 14:40:03
E-Stat
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 Eli Lilly paid for the entire graduating class to travel to and tour their facility in Indianapolis. On the last day, they were taken to a large meeting room with curtains covering the back wall. Once seated, they pulled back the curtains to reveal their Cray 2 on the other side of a glass wall.

They were the first commercial company to leverage the power of the fastest computer of its day for pharmaceutical product research and development.

Incredible to grasp that we all now have such power with our phones and streamers.

 

RE: Asianometry - that's a great show!, posted on July 26, 2024 at 19:48:46
AbeCollins
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 This is the first time I ran into Asianometry. I'll have to take a closer look at their shows.

[Edit]: I just searched YouTube for "Asianometry" and found this recent episode on "The Birth, Boom and Bust of the Hard Disk Drive"



 

RE: When my wife graduated pharmacy school in 1989, posted on July 26, 2024 at 19:53:11
AbeCollins
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There's a decommissioned Cray computer on display at NCAR down in the basement. It's open to the public. I don't recall the model as I haven't been down there in decades. It's one of the models with circular base with seat cushions.


 

The Cray 2, posted on July 26, 2024 at 20:09:30
E-Stat
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 was very different than previous models circulating non-conductive artificial blood plasma over the boards for cooling.

Bubbles.

Click here

 

Fluorinert is the liquid that Cray used, posted on July 26, 2024 at 23:40:33
AbeCollins
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 The Cray-1A serial number 3 is what they had on display at the NCAR Mesa Labs in Boulder.

I believe they moved it a few years ago to the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

NCAR Mesa Labs Boulder Colorado

NCAR Mesa Labs Boulder Colorado

NCAR Mesa Labs Boulder Colorado

NCAR Mesa Labs Boulder Colorado

Transporting the Cray-1A Serial Number 3 to WY


Notice the Silicon Graphics ONYX computer to the far left in the photo above. Scientists used SGI ONYX for creating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) visualizations for climate and weather modeling. SGI ONYX was sometimes called "the eyes of the Cray".


Trivia: Silicon Graphics developed the hardware for the Ninendo 64. It was a ground breaking design in the 1990's that brought the most realistic 3D graphics and 64-bit computing to a gaming platform in its day. SGI also sold SGI ONYX systems to game developers.

In 2000, Cray Inc. was formed when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI and adopted the name of its acquisition. In 2019, the company was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion.

I hired on at SGI in Mountain View, CA in 1991. I went to Sun Microsystems in 2000. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. I retired in 2022. I had my share of fun times.


 

Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on July 31, 2024 at 12:47:55
jedrider
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 I'll gladly forget the crude beginnings of computer technology.

The PDP-11s were cheerful looking, at least.

 

RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on July 31, 2024 at 19:08:24
AbeCollins
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 I worked for Calay Systems in the early 1980's, a manufacturer of CAD systems for automatic layout of printed circuit boards. I traveled the country installing and training customers on Calay "rip-up and reroute" systems. It basically went through several hundred iterations over night or longer to arrive at the best PCB trace layout for the components list it was given to work with.

Our system was based on the Q-BUS DEC LSI-11 that ran the RT-11 OS.

These systems would find the most efficient way to make connections between electronic components on a PCB. The resulting Gerber files were then sent off to a service that would convert the files into actual multi-layered printed circuit boards.

We interacted with the DEC via VT-101 terminal but the PCB designers used a mouse and a crude and hugely heavy color CRT. I don't recall what the color graphics subsystem was comprised of. I think it may have been proprietary.




 

RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on August 1, 2024 at 03:05:35
kh6idf
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 When I started my first job after college (EE degree), I was designing a set of circuit boards using CMOS logic chips and power MOSFET transistors.

We had a guy who did the circuit board layout after I had finalized the schematic. My prototypes were wire wrapped.

This was also in the early 1980's.

On one card, he routed a trace to ground along the perimeter of the board, traveling about 3/4 of the way around before reaching ground.

I got a call early one morning from the factory making the assembled boards. The boards were burning up during functional test. Turns out one of the power MOSFETS was oscillating at a frequency of about 400 MHz when it should have been just turning ON or OFF. We redid the trace to ground to take a much shorter path and that fixed it.

 

RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on August 1, 2024 at 09:44:49
AbeCollins
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 Similar path here. Aside from the HAM radio hobby in the early 70's I got my start in electronics in the late 70's and 80's. I remember the original 7400 series TTL, 74LSxx, 4000 series CMOS, 74HCxx CMOS, and the ever so popular (to me anyway) 2N2222 and 2N2907 transistors we used for heavier duty load switching following the digital logic outputs.

I did some wire wrapping too with a little tool that you placed over the IC socket pin and twisted between your fingers. The assembly lady 'pros' had battery powered wire wrap guns so we preferred having them do the more complex prototypes.

Those auto-router systems were far from perfect. The designer had to go in and manually cleanup the layout before sending the Gerber files out to the PCB house.


 

RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on August 1, 2024 at 11:14:33
kh6idf
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 OK, one more story from my working days:

After a few years as a circuit designer, I gravitated more toward the software realm. One day, we were testing a 777 flap/slat control unit for the first time in the lab, which had a real aisle stand, flap lever and one wing with flaps / slats / hydraulics, etc. Pretty much the real deal.

I had done an analysis of the end-to-end logic for extending the flaps/slats from the flap lever all the way to the torque tube rotation. There were a dozen or so steps and many of them reversed the logic. So we weren't 100% sure of what the software would do when the flap handle was moved out of the zero detent. Would the tube rotate in an extend or retract direction? Only one way to find out..

We had the mechanical guys who designed the gearbox watching, and as the handle was moved to extend, the tube was rotating in the wrong direction - to retract. The mechanical guys were in a panic, saying "oh no, we need to add another gear now and we don't have any room left!".

I said, don't worry, we can change the one to a zero in the code and it will rotate the other way.

The mechanical guy said "YOU CAN DO THAT??" :-)

 

RE: Ah, when disk drives looked like washing machines, posted on August 2, 2024 at 07:12:01
AbeCollins
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I like that story. Reminds me of Tesla recalls involving millions of vehicles. The solution? An over the air software update.



 

RE: The Rise and Fall of the Cray Supercomputer - for you tech nerds, posted on September 16, 2024 at 14:55:05
john65b
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 I remember at University of Illinois back in my BSME days, I had a room mate that just graduated CS and was working for the University. He took me to the Digital Lab, which was just a small white house (on Springfield?).

Anyway he took me in the basement and showed me the Cray Supercomputer (one of 3 back in early 80's). I remember thinking it looked like a Church Pew turned back on itself.

As I was admiring the Cray he told me that every single missile in Russia was aimed right at the Cray, and me....I felt a little queasy....


I VOID WARRANTIES

 

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