Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 03:09:52PM -0400, Heinz Wolter wrote:
> > There was a T-shirt that sold on ebay recently that says:
> > "My other computer is a Cray"..;) Strangely enough, Apple did have
> > some deal with Cray to offer Macs as front ends to Crays...
>
> http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/park/abm64/CrayWWWStuff/
>
> I'll have to dig, but the last time I read through this,
> a certain PowerBook model was used as a front-end..
I stand humbly corrected... s/Woz/Jobs/
>From the Cray Faq listed in the link - see below
What a shame to make the YMP VME Force IOP pretend
to be a lowly Mac or be relegated to NFS service...
Heinz
{snip}
Originally purchased to help out on a computer on a chip project, the
machines eventually earned their keep running MOLDFLOW an injection plastic
modelling program ( producing some results in the form of Quicktime movies)
and later as a file server. Other applications were CFD codes for disk drive
design improvement and one source reports ".. they sometimes ran the first
XMP as a single user MacOS emulator ... They had a frame buffer and a mouse
hooked up to the IOP."
T3d cube of cubes logo animated by changing the size of the surrounding
balls.
What is less known however is that the small active display panel on the T3d
was an Apple powerbook. The powerbook ran a Macromedia presentation showing
the T3d cube of cubes logo with an orbiting growing/shrinking sphere. The
display at one site was changed to alternate with a presentation plaque
display. It was rumoured that one site engineer ordered a collection of
spare bits that, over time, comprised a complete new powerbook.
The recent (Sept 1999) launch on the www.Apple.com web site of the G4
Macintosh computers displayed a YMP-8D computer on the processor page.
Whilst there was no direct reference to that particular machine the was a
requote of the Seymour quote about "using an Apple to simulate the Cray-3"
in a sidebar. ( prob this should be Cray-2 ED). The G4 is being touted as a
"Supercomputer for the desktop" and with the performance figures of a
Gigaflop/s (1 CPU) it is certainly up to at least 1992 supercomputer cpu
speed. The YMP pictured on the site would have had 0.333 Gflop/s per cpu but
was sold as sustaining 1 Gflop/s, for the whole machine, on real life
applications. It remains to be seen if the G4 can match the memory size,
memory bandwidth and IO capacity of this 8 year old Cray. Supercomputers
these days do a Teraflop/s. There is however no doubt that it will be
cheaper to buy.
Received on Fri Aug 03 2001 - 15:35:56 BST