Vintage Cray Research champagne glass

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/23/vintage-cray-research-champagn.html

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A: “Check it out; I networked two of them to work in parallel.”

B: “Dude, your hardware setup is CRAY CRAY.

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Today I have a glass that holds 1000 times as much and costs a dollar.

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Yeah, that’s a pretty apt analogy to x86s taking all the cool architectures out back and burying then in ugly cost effectiveness.

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Dang it, you beat me to the obvious pun!

Of course by some accounts Seymour Cray really was a little cray cray…

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm

Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said “Well, we have elves here, and they help me”. Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. “While I’m digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem”, he said.

I’m sure he was just yanking the interviewer’s chain…I hope.

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I checked thoroughly, I can live without it.

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Only to be buried in turn by ARM.

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I hope that glass has genuine lead paint.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of… (oh, sorry, /. flashback)

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I was expecting a flute. Instead, I get this… coupe? What the hell?

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I certainly wouldn’t want to be the person at Intel responsible for keeping ye olde revenue graph from sagging; but I’m honestly sort of surprised at how slow(and often how miserable) the progress has been once you get into devices that plug into mains power.

The massacre is effectively complete in places where parts like the Z3735g(can you build a Windows tablet for $50 retail? Indeed you can. Should you? Indeed you should not.) briefly made a stand; but if you want a bit more punch (and are buying in relatively small quantities; I assume ‘cloud’ scale entities have different options); you either find price merrily marching back up, or end up dealing with a BSP that redefines ‘support’ in ways that would shock even a veteran family court judge; or both.

You definitely see them around(Cavium seems to be popular); but ARM seems surprisingly apathetic about moving beyond the realm of replacing low end laptops and desktops with phone and tablet time. AMD made some noise about it(and as far as I know the A1100 exists, in principle), Qualcomm claims they are cooking something up; but it’s surprisingly quiet.

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I know his old babysitter. I’ll have to ask her about this.

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liked for:

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Time for a little… Cray Research.

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I would be more interested if he was not.
Where can I find these helpful elves?

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C: “Look at this! I made a heap of them!

B: “STACK OVERFLOW DUDE!”

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Just pour it into the cooling tower on the right and you’ll be ready to model some fluid dynamics.

image

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I get you.

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Not as cool as my vintage Pecco crane and rigging crystal.

I actually had my own Cray once – an XPM 2/4 if I remember correctly, running CTSS (Cray Time Sharing System, developed at Los Alamos). And by “had my own” I mean I was the only one using it.

Those were fun days, but looking back my currrent, non-clustered laptop blows it away…

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