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- Or can it?
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- I was browsing some magazines yesterday and ran across one story about a computer museum somewhere, that had Crays 1,2 and 3 (they said no Cray 4’s were ever assembled, the pieces just augmented the earlier designs). They pointed out that the Cray line was one of the last single-processor large scale systems built for pure speed and the fastest vector-computing systems ever; after that time designers moved largely to parallel processing. They noted that 3M still sells the Flourinate fluid Crays need for cooling (~$400/gal), and said that there are still two or three Crays out there in use. Hmmm…
- They didn’t give any comparisons as to how a Cray would stack up to a typical PC today. I have a PII 350 Mhz/320 megs RAM. Since I dunno how much RAM Crays ever had, let’s assume a small mathematical problem that will fit into my PC’s 320 megs, or the Crays’ RAM limit, whichever has less. Is my PC faster or does the Cray (1,2 or 3) still win? - MC
Heres a comparison for you
Cray I - 133 MILLIONS MEGAFLOPS
Sony Playstation 2 - 6.2 GIGAFLOPS (6200 MILLION MEGAFLOPS)
I’d say your Pentium II easily beats the Cray I. Wont beat the Playstation 2 though.
Notes from the field…
My company does a lot of heavy duty finite element work, and for years all the real monster models were created on high-end SGI workstations and then ftp’d over to a Cray C90/T90 in either San Diego or North Carolina.
Now we’re to the point where we create the huge models on our PC’s (or on our PC’s using software remotely on an SGI), and then run the models locally on an SGI Origin 2000 with (I think) 8 processors.
We’re still not at the point where a PC can take the place of a high-end computational server, but it is getting closer.
To see the current list of the fastest super computers, look at http://www.top500.org/ There are still some Crays in there, but most of them are parallel systems made up of 100’s or 1000’s of processors.
It should be noted that Cray was acquired by SGI quite some time ago, so there are no new Cray models. The supercomputer business belongs primarily to IBM and SGI now.
You are thinking of Cray Research (a spin-off of Cray), which was in fact sold to SGI in 1996, and subsequently sold to Tera Computer. If you visit Cray Inc’s website, you can see a lot of their new models.
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*Originally posted by Cerowyn *
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Actually, Cray Research (formerly NYSE:CYR; now owned by SGI, and apparently retired) was the original Cray; Cray Computer (NASDAQ:CRAY) was formed by the (unfortunately) late Dr. Seymour Cray after he left Cray Research.
I think… 
Whoops, I screwed up the cites, there. Sorry, Cerowyn.
You have to be careful when making comparisons like this becuase it is easy to compare apples to oranges which we all know doesn’t work too well.
I’ll use an analogy to illustrate:
You have a Ferrari and a Diesel Locomotive. The Ferrari can beat the locomotive in speed hands down. It can get from point A to point B much quicker.
In the OP it was stipulated that the problem being worked on by the Cray and the P-II would fit into 320MB of memory. This would be like putting a driver and a passenger in the car and the locomotive. Car wins.
However, the locomotive wasn’t really built to just carry two passengers. This breaks out of the restriction stipulated in the OP but the Cray is meant to handle MASSIVE amounts of data (such as would be used in a weather simulation).
If I now ask our Ferrari and locomotive to move 1,000 tons of cargo from point A to point B guess who wins? The locomotive blows the Ferrari away.
In short, each system was built to meet a different need. You can certainly come up with things that the P-II would win at but in other circumstances the Cray would walk away with the lead.
Also, the MFLOP number can be misleading. That number is a theoretical number based on calculations that assume perfect efficiency. Such efficiency is never achieved. Where the Playstation II shines is in its unified architecture. On paper a top notch PC would seem to beat it. However, since the Playstation is built to do one thing and one thing only the designers are able to optimize in ways that aren’t (but mayber should be) done in a PC. As a result a Playstation II can crank graphics rivaling all but the best PC’s with lower system specs. I could take an engine from a Ferrari and throw it into a Mazda but the Ferrari would still win easily since all its supporting goodies are likewise engineered to take best advantage of what’s under the hood.
Correct. The Cray systems were not just huge processors, but also included massive front-end disk arrays that fed data at amazing rates. The Crays were essentially huge array processors.
Even the earliest computers can outperform modern supercomputers at some tasks. For example, the 2nd digital computer ever made, Colossus, could crack Enigma keys faster than modern supercomputers because it was massively parallel and designed just for that task.
1 Gigaflop = 1000 Megaflops.
I’m not sure what the real numbers on the machines are, but by your example, the Cray I at 133 million megaflops (133,000 gigaflops) is over 20,000 times faster than the Sony PS2.
That should have read 133 MILLION FLOPS for the Cray. The PS2 is faster.
I used to walk past the Cray room occasionally when I worked at Phillips Petroleum. I rememeber the first time; it was like walking past St. Peter’s Bascillica or something. There was a sign on the wall that gave some of the details about the thing. It had, IIRC, 64 DEC Alpha processors and multiple GB of RAM. It was used used mainly for processing echo return data for finding oil deposits (a shaft was sunk, an explosive device detonated, and multiple microphones arrayed along the surface would pick up the echoes). On that floor of the building, which was specifically designed to house the Cray and several IBM 3090 machines, the use of two-way radios and cel phones was absolutely verboten.