Anyone want a Cray

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Tue Feb 17 19:56:04 1998

> Well, I personally doubt anyone will actually pay that amount since you
> could get similar computing power from a contemporary PC for a fraction of
> that price

Umm, really...

Even a low end EL would waste a hotshot PeeCee in a real world number
crunch contest. A Pentium II (or Alpha, or UltraSPARC II) just can not
keep up a good, sustained vector flow like a Cray. Getting a decent 100
Mflops is very hard to do on a desktop system today, but not for a ca.
1976 Cray-1. If this Cray for sale is a decent Y/MP type, it could
probably sustain many hundreds of Mflops, perhaps into a Gflop.

And then there is the issue of the memory bandwidth...

> so that rules out anyone wanting to buy it to put it to useful
> work, which leaves only the possibility that a collector or musuem would
> buy it, but again, not for that amount. I say wait for them to move on to
> the decision to scrap it and then try to bid on it.
>
> But it won't be cheap.

RCS/RI is going to have to look into this...

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Tue Feb 17 1998 - 19:56:04 GMT