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- Subject: Cray Supercomputer FAQ
- From: Newsposter@SpikyNorman.net (jen)
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- Archive-name: computer/system/cray/faq
- Posting-Frequency: bi-monthly
- Last-modified: Dec 2003
- Version: 1.1.0
- URL: http://www.SpikyNorman.net/
- Copyright: (c) 1999 "Fred Gannett"
- Maintainer: Fred Gannett <CrayFaq0220@SpikyNorman.net>
-
- Cray Research and Cray computers FAQ Part 3
-
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Cray Research and Cray computers FAQ Part 3
-
- * What's in a name ?
- * What's in a number ?
- * Where did the first ones go ?
- * Who has/had the most Cray systems ?
- * What is a T94/SSS ?
- * What went overseas ?
- * Keeping it cool
- * What's a Mega word ?
- * What is an SSD ?
- * What is SEC-DED ?
- * Binary compatibility
- * How did users shape the design of Cray machines ?
- * Why was it hard to program Cray machines ?
- * What is boundary scan ?
- * How is a T3d different from a Beowoulf/NOW/PC cluster ?
- * What is dumping ?
- * How do you start a Cray system ?
- * Instructions for starting a Cray EL system
- * Chips off the same block
- * Could you choose the colour of your Cray machine ?
- * What was Ducky Day ?
- * What were the code names rain, gust, drizzle, cyclone etc ?
- * What was the physically smallest Cray machine ?
- * What was the physically largest Cray machine ?
- * What was the computationally largest machine that Cray made ?
- * What limits prevented Cray from building even "bigger" machines ?
- * What was the Cray connection with Apple ?
- * How many people worked for Cray Research ?
- * Who ran Cray Research
- * Was a Cray supercomputer value for money ?
- * Did Cray fail? It was bought out by SGI in 1996
- * Whats happening now ?
- * Trademark Disclaimer and copyright notice
-
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
- This Cray supercomputer Faq is split into sections, Part 1 describes
- Cray supercomputer families, Part 2 is titled "Tales from the crypto and
- other bar stories", part 3 is "FAQ kind of items", part 4 is titled
- "Buying a previously owned machine" and part 5 is "Cray machine
- specifications". Corrections, contributions and replacement paragraphs
- to CrayFaq0220@SpikyNorman.net Please see copyright and other notes at the
- end of each document. Note: Part 3 is the only part posted to
- newsgroups, the latest version of this and the rest of the documents can
- be located in http format just down from:
-
- Portable URL http://www.SpikyNorman.net/
- ISP Specific http://www.SpikyNorman.dsl.pipex.com/CrayWWWStuff/index.html
-
- Xmas 2003 The webpages are moving please update any ISP direct links
-
- What's in a name ?
-
- Cray Research (CRI), the original founded by Seymour Cray Jr. in 1972 bought by
- SGI in 1996. Was considered a seperate business unit within SGI from 1999 that was
- Sold to Tera Computer in 2000 who then changed their name to Cray Inc
- Cray Computer Corporation, spun off from CRI to Colorado Springs. 1989 .. 1995
- Cray Labs research arm of Cri in Boulder in the early 1980s.
- Cray Communications, Not related, changed name to Anite corp.
- Cray Electronics ditto.
- CraySoft, a venture to exploit the compiler technology and expertise of the
- application software development group. This lead to the interesting fact
- the each time a program was compiled on a T3e the compile script checked to
- see if the machines was running Solaris!
- SuperTek, original developer of the XMS, was bought in 1989 by CRI
- Floating point systems, original developer of the CS6400, folded in 198?,
- assets bought by CRI. Was sometimes known as Cray Research Superservers (CRS)
- SSI, Supercomputer systems Inc, founded by Steve Chen chief architect of the YMP.
-
- Crayfaq@spikynorman.net, Caryfaq@spikynorman.net, Newsposter@spikynorman.net,
- These email addresses have been discontinued and blackholed due to the huge
- quantity of spam sent to them.
- Please use the current email address CrayFaq0220@.... for communications about this
- faq.
-
- What's in a number ?
-
- All CPU chassis, SSD chassis and in the larger machines IOS chassis had
- serial numbers but the CPU chassis number was taken as the main system
- designation. From the serial number it is possible to get a general
- indication of the model type as different ranges of machines were grouped
- into ranges of numbers. The structure of the model designation varied but
- often indicated the max. number of CPUs that could be installed, the chassis
- size, and sometimes the memory size.
-
- Cray Research System Serial numbers
- Machine type
- <100 Cray 1
- 1nn XMP 2 CPUs
- 2nn XMP 4 CPUs
- 3nn XMP 1 CPU
- 4nn XMP 2 CPUs
- 5nn XMP 1 CPU (SE)
- 6nn Cray/ELS XMS 1 CPU
- 10nn YMP 8 CPUs, Model D IOS
- 11nn XMP/EA 4 CPUs
- 12nn XMP/EA 2 CPUs
- 13nn XMP/EA 1 CPU (SE)
- 14nn YMP 2 CPUs, Model D IOS
- 15nn YMP 4 CPUs, Model D IOS
- 16nn YMP 2 CPUs, Model E IOS
- 17nn YMP 8 CPUs, Model E IOS YMP8I
- 18nn YMP 8 CPUs, Model E IOS YMP8E
- 19nn YMP 4 CPUs, Model E IOS
- 20nn Cray 2, 2/4 CPUs
- 2101 Cray 2, 8 CPUs
- 24nn Cray YMP/M94 4 CPU
- 26nn Cray YMP/M92 2 CPU
- 28nn Cray YMP/M98 8 CPU
- 3nnn SV-1
- 40nn C90 16 CPUs
- 42nn C92A 2 CPU
- 43nn D92A 2 CPU
- 44nn C94A 4 CPU
- 46nn C94 4 CPU
- 47nn D94 4 CPU
- 48nn C98 8 CPU
- 49nn D98 8 CPU
- 5nnn ELs
- 60nn T3d
- 61nn T3d Included in a YMP2E + IOS
- 62nn T3d
- 63nn T3E 300 - liquid cooled
- 65nn T3E 600 - air cooled
- 66nn T3E 600 - air cooled
- 67nn T3E 900 - liquid cooled
- 68nn T3E 900 - liquid cooled
- 69nn T3E 1200 - liquid cooled
- 70nn T94 4 CPU
- 71nn T916 16 CPU
- 72nn T932 32 CPU
- 9nnn J90
- 95nn J90 32 CPUs
-
- Notes:
-
- The < 100 series can be further subdivided, among the Cray-1, Cray-1A,
- Cray-1S, and Cray-1M lines. SN101 was the first XMP with 2 cpus
-
- Eugene R. Somdahl posted in c.u.c The 1Ms were 1Ss with MOS memory. I
- believe only six were built. Plus one that wound up as "scrap" running CTSS
- for several years in a basement in Chippewa Falls. This was the machine on
- which much of the Y-MP (and later Chen's MP project) design work was done.
-
- XMP/EA: systems had 500 series serial numbers. Production ran from sn501 (19
- Jul 87) through SN515 (15 Jan 89).
-
- Cray-2: Later, a small number of variants occurred: 2 and 8 processors, 128
- MW and 512 MW, Dynamic RAM (DRAM) and Static RAM (SRAM) don't know what SNs
- Only Serial numbers Q1,Q2 and 2001..2029 built.
-
- SN1001 Had slower clock speed than later YMP 8s.
-
- SN1040: Originally a Model D IO system it was converted to Model E IOS for
- use as a T3d host then later went to Moscow.
-
- Cray-2 SN2000 (only a single CPU) and SN2101 (only 8 CPU) now reside in the
- computer museum at Moffett field CA. There were 4 single cpu Cray2 systems
- built, Q1 -> Q4. Only one was shipped to a customer, one was in Eagan and 2
- were used as test systems in Chippewa.
-
- The 1700 series was known as a Y-MP8I because it could hold 8 CPU's with 1
- SSD Section and 4 IOSE clusters in a single integrated chassis. One 1700
- chassis was rewired to hold three 1600 type machines. That wiremat wasn't
- pretty. Served in CCN as software development machines ICE, FROST and
- SUBZERO.
-
- The 1800 series known as the Y-MP8E with similar module layout to a 1000
- series but could hook up to a Model E IOS. It would typically hook up to a
- 700 series Model E IOS which had a chassis very similar to an 1800 that
- holds 4 SSD sections and 8 IOSE clusters.
-
- IOSE/SSDE boxes usually came in three serial number ranges 7xx, 8xx and 9xx.
- The 8xx is a short chassis like the 1600 that held 1 SSDE section and 2 or 3
- I/O clusters. The 900 chassis looked like a 700 chassis but was only wired
- for SSDE.
-
- A couple of these machine types (1600, 1900 and 6100) could support a JSSD
- (SSDE32i/SSDE128i). That was a 32 or 128 Mword SSD that fit in a single
- chassis slot.
-
- The T3D 6100 series integrated 128 EV4's 2 Y-MP CPU's and 4 IOSE clusters
- into 1 chassis, and a 6200 which I believe is like a 6100 without the
- Y-MP/IOSE integration.
-
- SV-1 may comprise of a cluster of systems resulting in the use of more than
- one serial numbers.
-
- SV-1 SN3001 to SN3007 and SN3213 to 3220 ... note that SN3217-3220 comprise
- SN3501 (super-cluster) at NIH.
-
- In 1978 5 Cray-1 systems were installed. In 1996 350 Cray J90 systems where
- shipped the large part of the total of 415 J90 systems. Some J90 systems are
- being converted to SV1 chasis just to keep the records complicated.
-
- If you know sub ranges of serial numbers or special variants from the above
- pattern please email the document author. Details of C3, C4 and CRS6400
- numbers would also be appreciated.
-
- The small serial number ranges indicate that the phrase "Hand built in
- Chippewa Falls" was never far from the truth. With SGI winding down
- development of the big Cray machines will we ever see Cray SN10,000?
-
- Where did the first ones go ?
-
- The early adopters of a technology are the crucial customers that can make
- or break a developing technology company so it is interesting to look where
- the first few Cray-1 machines were installed. In 1978 5 Cray-1 systems were
- installed.
-
- The first Cray one SN1 went to LASL in 04/76 for a six month evaluation
- after which a short-term contract was signed. In 09/77 SN1 was replaced
- with SN4, a 1000k word machine with SECDED memory protection hardware.
- SN1 Ran an OS called DEMOS written in MODEL.
-
- SN2 was gutted and never shipped.
-
- Looking at the Cray 1 installed base in the 1976 to 1979 time frame.
-
- Date, Place, application
- 04/76, LASL Los Alamos NM, Nuclear research later replaced by SN3
- 07/77, NCAR CO, Atmospheric research
- 10/77, ECMWF UK, Weather forecasting initially SN1 later replaced in 10/78
- 01/78, US DOD, Defence research
- 07/78, US DOD, Defence research
- 04/78, NNFECC National magnetic fusion energy centre Livermore CA, magnetic fusion
- research
- 09/78, United computing systems Kansas City MO, Commercial computing services
- 10/78, MOD UK, Defence research Used SN1 replaced 04/79
- 01/79, Lawrence Livermore Lab Ca, Nuclear research
- 04/79, Cray Research Inc., Development and bench marking
-
- The machines above were 500k or 1000k Words. These machines were so far
- ahead of their time that many of them worked at a number of sites, sometimes
- being leased for short periods until the customer-ordered machine was ready.
-
- Most non-government Cray-1 systems were front-ended by CDC CYBER 170
- systems, IBM MVS or VM machines or DEC VAX systems.
-
- Apart from the first Cray-1, which travelled the world, the first machine of
- most product types typically served in the Cray computer centre (CCN) first
- at Mendota Heights and later at 655 Lone Oak Road, Eagan.
-
- The first (prototype) Y-MP/8D, sn1001, served in the Cray computer centre as
- the compute platform "Mist" ( later changed name to "Gust" as "Mist" is a
- rude word in German ).
-
- The first (prototype) X-MP, sn101, remained on the floor of the 1440
- building until 1989 (17 Aug 82 - 25 May 89). ... It was subsequently
- scrapped.
-
- The first Y-MP2E, sn1601, travelled to the UK and served in the Cray UK data
- centre as a software development machine.
-
- Pittsburg super computer centre (PSC) had the first customer T3D and T3E.
-
- Cray 2 customers included NMFECC, NASA Ames, University of Minnesota, US
- DOD, Harwell Laboratory UK, Aramco, University of Stuttgart in Germany and
- Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
-
- Quoted from From HPC wire Subject: 9037 CASH-STARVED CRAY COMPUTER CLOSES,
- SEEKS CHAPTER 11 Mar. 27 CCC did make one tentative sale, to Lawrence
- Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for support of the Department of
- Energy's nationwide research program. In December 1991 when CCC was unable
- to meet delivery/performance goals, the order was cancelled.
- A small (4-CPU) CRAY-3 was later placed at the National Center for
- Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where, after some time and effort, it became
- ready for production work. This was not followed, however, by an actual
- sale.
-
- Who has/had the most Cray systems?
-
- According to the SuperSites list in Aug 1999 The NSA runs a lot of Cray
- machines.
-
- National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland,US
- 1) Cray T3E-1200 LC1084 1300.8
- 2) Cray T3E-900 LC1328 1195.2
- 3) Cray SV1-18/576 576
- 4) SGI Origin2000/250-864 432
- 5) Cray T3E-1200 LC284 340.8
- 6) 3 * Cray T932/321024 174
- 7) Cray T3E-750 LC220 165
- 8) Cray T94/SSS-256K 100
- ... snip
- 20) 4 * Cray C916/161024 64
-
- I can't possibly comment but the only other place where so many Cray
- machines have been co-located is in the 655-D machine room of CCN located in
- the Cray Eagan building (now Wham!net). The population of that centre
- changed over time but will have had just about every sort of Cray Research
- machine at one time or another. As the CCN data centre was used to house and
- manage customer machines there was often more than one of each current
- production system.
-
- What is a T94/SSS ?
-
- The SSS designation on a T90 indicates a special configuration that was
- developed for particular customer. Its actual "speciality" may be seen in a
- section of an ARPA document on the net. The document mentions a processor in
- memory development for the Cray-3 for use in " This machine would be suited
- for parallel applications that require a small amount of memory per process.
- Examples of such applications are laminar flow over a wing, weather
- modeling, image processing, and other large cale simulations or
- bit-processing applications." It is thought (by me anyway) that this
- development was updated into T90 technology.
-
- What went overseas ?
-
- To the eastern block.
-
- * An EL went to Prague.
- * 2 ELs and later a YMP-4E and two J90s went to Poland.
- * An EL and later a YMP-8E went to Moscow.
- * A C90 went to China.
- * An XMP went to India for weather forecasting.
-
- All with the agreement of the export control authorities.
-
- The first mainframe class Cray machine was installed in Moscow the same week
- that the Moscow branch of "Planet Hollywood" opened.
-
- International subsidiaries as of December 31, 1995. It could be reasonably
- assumed that the offices were for the supply and support of Cray Research
- computers in the host country. Not in the list is the UAE and the large
- Aramco site that had a Cray-2 followed by a C98-DRAM machine.
-
- International offices
- Cray Research A.B. Sweden
- Cray Research Scandinavia A/S Norway
- Cray Research (Australia) Pty. Ltd. Australia
- Cray Research B.V. The Netherlands
- Cray Research (Canada) Inc. Canada
- Cray Research Europe Ltd. United Kingdom
- Cray Research France S.A. France
- Cray Research GmbH Germany
- Cray Research Japan, Ltd. Japan
- Cray Research (Korea) Ltd. Korea
- Cray Research (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. Malaysia
- Cray Research de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Mexico
- Cray Research OY Finland
- Cray Research, S.A.E. Spain
- Cray Research S.R.L. Italy
- Cray Research (Suisse) S.A. Switzerland
- Cray Research (UK) Ltd. United Kingdom
-
- Keeping it cool
-
- The development of Cray cooling technology allowed each technology
- generation to increase the circuit board density. "Someone (perhaps Gary
- Smaby? I truly don't remember) once said that Cray Research was primarily a
- refrigerator company."
-
- Cray-1: Single sided boards clamped to copper plates placed in aluminium
- racks that had cooling fluid in tubes.
- XMP: Double side sandwich boards clamped to twin copper plates placed in
- aluminium racks which had cooling fluid in tubes.
- Cray-2,3,4: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of
- electrically inert cooling fluid.
- YMP, C90, T3d LC, T3e MC: Double-sided circuit boards clamped to hollow
- aluminium boards in which the cooling fluid circulated.
- El,J90,T3eAC,SV-1: Blown air cooling.
- T90: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of
- electrically inert cooling fluid.
-
- So the main forms of cooling were conduction to external cooling, conduction
- to internal coolant, blown air cooling and total immersion cooling. There
- was some research done into sprayed coolant methods for J90 modules,
- reported in an internal technical symposium paper, but this did not make it
- into a publicly available product.
-
- What's a Mega word ?
-
- All Cray machines (except the CS6400 range) had 64 bit words. Each word
- could hold 1 integer, 1 floating point numeric value or 8 characters. All
- arithmetic and logical operations were done in 64 bit maths. Memory sizes
- were generally designated in Mega Words. 32 MWd can be thought of as 256
- Megabytes. However really the memory was 72 or 80 bits wide at the hardware
- level See SECDED.
-
- What is an SSD
-
- Bigs gobs of memory that are attached via very high speed channels to vector
- CPUs. These extra memories, often 4 to 16 times the size of central memory
- could be utilised as disk IO cache, swap space, extra memory segments for
- programs or even RAM based file systems. These memories were accessed on a
- YMP at up to 1000 Mbytes/sec and are often used to transparently hide the IO
- required for an out-of-memory solution. Sites that used SSD as root/usr file
- system disk cache often saw little or no physical disk activity even when
- the system was stressed. A trickle sync mechanism was employed to prevent
- these vast disk caches from becoming stale.
-
- Some later SSDs were built from J90 technology memory boards and some from
- T3E boards.
-
- What is SECDED ?
-
- Single bit Error Correction, Double bit Error Detection. This was a hardware
- scheme used in all Cray machine (except the very first C1 and CRS systems)
- to allow single bit memory errors to be effectively ignored and for
- detecting other memory errors to prevent memory data corruption. Each 64 bit
- word had 8 other bits that were used in this advanced parity
- checking/correction method. If a double bit error was detected a syndrome
- byte indicated where the error had occurred. SECDED on the C90 has 64+16
- bits and allowed correction at the 4-bit level.
-
- Binary compatibility
-
- Binary compatibility, the ability to run programs compiled on one machine on
- another, extended back one generation only. You could run XMP binaries on a
- YMP but not on a C90. The J90 counted like a YMP.
-
- There were some cross compilation libraries available so that you could make
- binaries for different architectures i.e. it was possible to build YMP
- native codes on an XMP. Cray always recommended recompilation on the newer
- system in the case of an upgrade in order to take advantage of the new
- hardware features.
-
- Execution compatibility across the range looks like :
-
- C1 --> XMP --> XMPema --> YMP --> C90 --> T90
- | | ^
- V V |
- XMS --> ELs --> J90 --> J90se --> SV1
- *
- *
- T3d ==> T3e
- APP --> CS64 --> CS64000
- C2 . C3 . C4
-
- For binary compatibility you can go across one arrow or up/down one arrow
- only.
-
- Note ==> the T3e used the same programming models as the T3d and so was
- source code compatible with only minor exceptions.
-
- Note ** An MPP emulator was available for ELs to develop MPP codes while
- waiting for the T3 product line to arrive. The emulator managed about 4 MPP
- nodes but used the native CRI arithmetic.
-
- Note The C90 could run J90 binaries if compiled without the scalar cache
- optimisation. The T90 comes with either Cray Floating Point CPUs or IEEE
- CPUs (or both).T90 IEEE arithmetic CPUs will not support C90 native codes.
-
- The C4 had IEEE FP and went back to lots of registers instead of local
- memory. There was no binary compatibility between the C2, C3 and C4.
-
- How did users shape the design of Cray machines ?
-
- System owners asked for and got machine instructions to do "population
- counts", leading zero and later a bit matrix multiply functional unit. BMM
- was provided as an option on C90 and standard on all T90 CPUs.
-
- Hardware based gather/scatter instructions were included in the EL and later
- systems. This instruction allowed the compilers to manage array indexed data
- more efficiently.
-
- See also What is a T94/SSS ?
-
- Why was it hard to program Cray machines ?
-
- There has always been lots of Unix src code sloshing round on the net since
- well before Linux and the admirable open src code movement was invented.
- However there were a couple of things about Cray machines that made porting
- codes to Cray machines tricky. We won't get into what you had to do to your
- algorithm to get the best out of a Cray machine but just examine a few
- things that made the conversion of codes to Cray machines interesting.
-
- Firstly there was the word size, one rather large size fitted all, integers
- and floats were represented in 64 bits, whereas most other machines used 16
- or 32 bit for ints and floats. This would not cause a problem in well
- written codes unless assumption were made about the range of an integer or
- the relative sizes of integers to character data types.
-
- Cray PVP machines are word addressable, the T3D and T3E are byte addressable
- machines.
- Although the compilers used transparent word division to mimic byte addressable
- constructs, advanced character handling was never a natural process on a
- Cray machine.
-
- When the original arithmetic units were designed for Cray PVP systems, the
- IEEE floating point standard for arithmetic overflow and underflow did not
- exist. The IEEE standard compromises performance in favour of ease of use
- and so may not have made it in anyway. The Cray floating point format
- provided a different range of numbers and level of accuracy that tripped up
- some programs.
-
- There are also other subtle considerations that have caused headaches for
- many programmers porting codes to Cray machines. Known collectively as the
- "Cray effect", they are the combination of algorithm scaling problems,
- cyclic accumulation of errors and parallelism interdependencies that seem to
- show up most times you take an apparently well behaved small program and run
- it longer harder and further than possible on a conventional system.
-
- A source adds :
- Possibly the most subtle problem in porting
- programs to UNICOS was that some very "bright"
- person put a #define for "WORD" in a header
- file required by the kernel. The first
- thing to do in porting a program to UNICOS
- was to find if it used WORD as a #define
- or as a typedef and work around that.
-
- Cray machines could not support "alloca", so
- minor magic had to be applied to programs
- using "alloca."
-
- In the very early days, many C programs
- suffered from the "nUxi" problem, but that
- was hardly unique to Cray machines.
-
- At various times, the following languages were available on Cray machines,
- FORTRAN 66,77,90,HPF, Cray C, Standard C, C++, Pascal, Ada, Perl, but never
- GNU C or Basic. There was an implementation of APL for the CRAY-1, and an
- implementation of SNOBOL 4. Neither was ever "officially supported." LANL is
- reported to have ported Common LISP as documented in Dick Gabriel's MIT
- Press PhD thesis.
-
- What is boundary scan ?
-
- This is a low level logic feature that is used to initialise and test the
- logic state of a board in a machine. Originally introduced on the EL it was
- later adopted and used on the J90 and T90 machines.
-
- Scan files are unique to each CPU/memory board type. On the early EL systems
- boundary scan tapes with pre-built scan initialisation files for various
- part numbered CPUs were available but had to be updated whenever a later
- revision of board was used.
-
- As the number of CPU module types mushroomed, Cray engineering realised the
- service problems associated with scan tapes. Releasing the scb command and
- the associated ASIC data files structures allowed service personnel to
- rebuild scan files of a machine in the field.
-
- If you know that your hardware is sound you can use scb command to
- regenerate boundary scan files, as long as you have the /install/asic files
- and scb command.
-
- The bscan command is used to read and write the scan state off/onto a board
- to progress hardware problems.
-
- How is a T3d different from a Beowulf/NOW/PC cluster ?
-
- This section could also have the title "The return of the Killer (network
- of) micros." The battles between the proponents of the "network of
- workstations" and the "it's only a supercomputer if it costs more than 1M$
- per CPU" crowd rattle endlessly round the halls of comp.sys.super but we are
- not going discuss the merits or otherwise of MPPs V. Vector supers. This
- section is purely to describe some of the differences between modern
- implementations of MPP technology. The term cluster can be considered to
- refer to any collection of generic parts pushed together to make a compute
- engine. e.g. Beowulf, NOW, SP2. An understanding of the applications that
- you will be using in an MPP system is vital when deciding what performance
- attributes are important to you.
-
- There are four main areas of differences between a cluster and a T3e,
- . Interconnect bandwidth ( and low latency ),
- . Single system image,
- . Programming models, and
- . I/O ability.
- Some of these differences may erode, as cluster technology develops,
- but for now these differences stand to justify the extra 0s on the price.
-
- Interconnect bandwidth and low latency: To make effective use of an MPP
- computer or cluster the problem/program has to split the work between
- multiple CPUs. Inevitably the whole task will require some communication
- between the nodes working on the different parts of the answer. Sometimes
- this co-ordination is only a very small part of the process, with just a
- distribution of sections of the problem, at the start, and the collection of
- the answers at the end, but with other types of problem close
- synchronisation and large amounts of inter processor data passing is
- required.
-
- This is where understanding the speed and latency between the processing
- nodes becomes important. Inter processor synchronisation speed depends on
- network latency. Inter processor data passing speed depends on network
- bandwidth. Total communication bandwidth depends on the interconnection
- topology and sophistication of the routing algorithm.
-
- The amount of communication required by a cartoon film render farm, for
- instance, would be at the low end of the communication requirements scale
- whereas a large finite element or fluid dynamic problem would be at the top
- end requiring low latency interconnects and high bandwidth. Combining these
- factors is the ratio of communication time to processing time. Delays in
- synchronisation and bandwidth become less significant if the calculation
- time between communication is long.
-
- See The Gannett's law document for a description of a possible method of
- assessing problems and cluster computer solutions.
-
- Single system image: The T3e has a single system image, this is not to be
- confused by the fact that the operating system is distributed across an
- number of CPUS. One of the main benefits is that there is just one OS to
- upgrade, monitor, boot and tune. Another even more important benefits is the
- availability of global memory data segments, closer synchronisation between
- the processing elements and shared filesystem access. The downside of a
- single system image is a high degree of inter node dependence that can make
- hardware problems tricky to find and fix. The close PE co-ordination makes
- command and task load balancing fast and efficient.
-
- Programming models: The hardware support of a barrier tree mechanism allows
- fast multi-node synchronisation. The eureka hardware support allows problems
- with wide solution branching to be co-ordinated on "first to find the
- results" basis. Hardware support for atomic swap (and block memory move)
- allows for fast and accurate semaphore operation between shared memory
- locations. Clusters support the message passing programming models but also
- seen in the T3e are the shared memory programming models popular from
- symmetric multiprocessor systems.
-
- Processor interconnect: The high level of processor and network integration
- allows the T3e to perform multi-node process moves, checkpointing and
- program debugging. Problems that require 1000s of process synchronisation
- per short problem step can only be realistically considered on the T3e.
-
- IO ability: Clusters can work well in the cases where the IO is limited or
- centralised but many super computer applications are defined by large
- amounts of computation and huge amounts of data. The T3es provision of large
- shared file systems that makes sharing of huge datasets between
- computational processors easy. Support for huge raid disk arrays equally
- available across all CPUs in the system make shared file access routine. NFS
- cross mounting between 100s of processing nodes just doesn't provide the
- strength for many big problems. The emergence of multinode access
- filesystems on the SP2 have served to make IO a closer race.
-
- So to sum up a T3e is best suited to problems whose parts require very high
- levels of synchronisation, co-ordination and communication. If the
- requirement is for chunks of computer power loosely coordinated over long
- time steps and budget is a big consideration generic cluster technology
- should be considered.
-
- What is dumping ?
-
- Copying memory contents to disk, copying disk contents to tape or selling
- computers at less than cost to stuff the opposition. CRI filed a government
- investigated dumping complaint against NEC over the supply of a system to
- NCAR. In a later quirk of economic fourtunes Cray Inc now sells the NEC
- machines into the Amerian market.
-
- How do you start a large Cray system ?
-
- This is the short version, the full version fills a very long chapter and a
- whole day on the "Unicos kernel internals" course. The exact details varied
- a bit from generation to generation but the principals remained the same.
- Starting from a cold machine, the first thing to do would be to call the
- Cray engineer to start the power conditioning MG set. Next check the
- cooling circuits and WACS panel on the side of the main cabinet, to see that
- the power supply rails and temperature levels are normal. Working from the
- MWS the engineer would then master clear the machine to initialise the
- processor and IO channel logic. After this the first code would be copied
- main memory and the DEAD START command issued. The first code would usually
- be diagnostics to set and check the internal logic of the CPUs and memory.
- This diagnostic stage was largely replaced by the boundary scan logic in
- later systems.
-
- Finally the system would be handed over to the operators for the booting of
- Unicos. The Unicos boot process went like this. Firstly all the CPUs are
- halted and, starting from word 0, the kernel is copied into main memory from
- the OWS or support disk, along with a parameter file describing the hardware
- environment, kernel parameters, disk and IOS layout. At this point CPU 0
- would deadstart and run while the rest of the CPUS idled. The kernel parsed
- the parameter file and used it to locate the IOSs and root partition, both
- of which it would need for single user mode. Once in single user mode the
- rest of boot sequence ( triggered by init 2 ) was much like most Unixs,
- spawn the service demons, initialise the networks, check and mount the rest
- of the file systems, spawn the console gettys.
-
- There were many an interesting reasons why systems would not boot but most
- of them came down to hardware problems, incorrect parameter files and Unicos
- bugs on new hardware. Finding what was causing a system boot failure was of
- course a source of endless amusement.
-
- Instructions for starting a Cray EL system
-
- Check the "big red button" is up. Switch system power on at the power
- breaker on rear mchine wait until system ready indicator lights up on front
- panel of the machine. Press the system reset buttons under the flap on the
- front of the machine. Let the console messages and diagnostics scroll up.
-
- It should come to the BOOT> prompt. Type "load" this will scan the hardware
- looking for disks and controllers according to the config.sys file on the
- IOS disk. It will also run diagnostics if this is a cold start.
-
- At this point you should have a IOS> prompt. You can now cat /bin/boot Look
- for the line that has something like
- lu /sys/sys.ymp /sys/config.uni
-
- /sys/sys.ymp is the kernel the other is the text parameter file which
- describes the disks/filesystems that Unicos will use. Then type "boot" to
- start Unicos into single user mode. The system should now arrive at the #
- Unicos prompt. Check your file systems with /etc/gencat. When this is
- complete go to multi user mode with init 2
-
- Typing ^a on the console switched you between talking to the IOS and talking
- to the Unicos console unless either the scroll lock (right next to the
- delete key) had been pressed or the console line had been switched into
- remote support mode in which case the machine just looks hung.
-
- A computer based learning training course for system operators was
- constructed that simulated the boot sequence and other basic EL maintenance
- procedures. See the annotated boot sequence in a near by document.
-
- Chips off the same block
-
- What was the difference between the Alpha chips used in the T3[de] and other
- Alpha chips ? Basically not much except in the liquid cooled T3[de] versions
- the chip was packaged upside down. Normally the heat from the Alpha
- chip is dissipated through an air heat sink on the top of the chip but with
- the T3e providing cooling from inside the board the packaging was flipped to
- have the heat go down instead of up. DEC also provided a pin to allow CRI to
- run data fetches big-endian rather than little-endian.
-
- Heat| ++++++ chips
- V ====== PCB board
- -------- Cooling fluid in hollow copper module
- ^ ====== PCB board
- Heat| ++++++ Chips
-
- There was some consternation in 1997 when Intel bought the Alpha chip
- fabrication plant, the prospect of putting "Intel Inside" on the case of the
- Cray T3e filled purists with horror.
-
- What was Ducky day ?
-
- This was an employee fun day that happened once a year at the Eagan
- buildings. The day was a holiday for all staff with organised sport and
- social events. The Tee shirt design of the day was decided by a cartoon
- competition. The origins of the "Ducky day" name came from a prank; a plastic duck
- was found in the rather grand water pond with sculpture outside the 1440
- building. The facilities manager issued a rather stern warning so the next
- day the pond was filled to the brim with yellow plastic ducks.
-
- A Revisionist view of Ducky day From Bill P.
- Ducky Day began at the Mendota Heights facility (1440 Bldg.) and was moved
- to the Eagan facility with the construction of the new campus. The combination
- fountain/sculpture was christened "Octal". It was made of wooden lattice work,
- concrete and plumbing (probably procured from a local Menards Building Center).
- On the company move to the "new" Cray Research Park from the 1440 Northland Drive
- facility, the first ducky day at the new location was celebrated by
- putting the torch to the wooden portion of the reassembled sculpture on the island
- in the middle of Cray Lake. This "Viking like" ceremony was presided over by Bob
- Ewald, the VP of Software Development at that time.
-
-
- What were the code names rain, gust, drizzle, cyclone etc ?
-
- Up to about 1994 the computers in the Cray Research, Eagan and Chippewa
- Falls, machines rooms in were known by their serial numbers. For
- manufacturing this was fine but for the Eagan centre it was a pain as
- computers were replaced and upgraded on a reasonably regular basis. CCN in
- Eagan was more interested in running compute environments so it was decided
- that each type compute platform benchmarking, filestore, batch engine etc.
- would have an environment name instead. This meant that "Rain" as a compute
- platform started out as a YMP8e but later transparently changed into a C90
- with less disruption to the end users. The exception to this was USS the
- Data Migration file server that was always called USS. The
- biggest machines in Eagan were interconnected by very high speed networking,
- HYPER channel in the early days, and later (@1994) 200MB/s HIPPI
- connections.
-
- Could you choose the colour of your Cray machine ?
-
- In the early days of the company yes, there was even rumour of a cowhide
- covered XMP delivered to a Houston oil company. As time went on this was
- dropped as a customer option. Well almost - when there is that much money
- changing hands, if enough fuss is made, the exterior panels would revisit
- the paint shop. This did not apply to Els which were all black and red. Well
- almost - one customer which had just upgraded a pair of YMPs (one green, one
- blue) for a C90 and an EL did manage to get the EL painted a rather fetching
- sky blue colour.
-
- As for XMP/EA, sn501 and internal contact reports "We lobbied to have it
- done up in denim (like the denim Jeans) & have a little red Levis tag
- attached. ... Management was not amused & it never happened."
-
- One second user customer did have a bit of a surprise when their second user
- C90 arrived in a lurid deep rose/pink colour. The top of the C90, being a
- convex shape happened to sit just a couple of feet under a set of strip
- lights and resulted in lovely pink glow over a whole section of the machine
- room.
-
- The Bell Labs Cray (XMP) was a wallpaper'ed IC design.
-
- What was the physically smallest Cray machine ?
-
- The smallest, commercially available machine, was the EL92 a repackaged
- version of the air cooled EL range which measured approx. 1.2m high by 0.6m
- wide by 0.6m deep and could run from a normal power outlet. Whilst not a big
- commercial success as it was a bit late to market, it was widely used for
- trade shows, software development and as loan equipment. Available in 2 and
- 4 CPU versions with 512Mb memory it was truly a deskside Cray. Good write up
- and pictorial in "Advanced systems" magazine July 1994.
-
- What was the physically largest Cray machine?
-
- The 16 CPU version of the C90 was a truly big machine standing at 2.5m tall
- and CPU cab just fitting in a 4m diameter circle. Together with the power
- and cooling equipment the whole system weighed in at approx. 12 (?) tonnes.
- There was one (or more?) systems delivered that consisted of four
- interconnected 16 CPU C90s.
-
- What was the computationally largest machine that Cray made ?
-
- In December 1998 the biggest machine was a 1048 CPU T3e assembled by Cray
- and temporaly released to a small community of scientists. This machine was
- subsequently delivered to an undisclosed customer. The design at that time would
- scale up to 2176 Cpus before node addressing limits were reached.
-
- The "Guinness World records 2000" has the Cray C90/16 as the fastest general
- purpose vector-parallel computer but we all know this should be updated to
- the T90/32.
-
- What limits prevented Cray from building even "bigger" machines ?
-
- By bigger in supercomputing terms we mean more CPU horsepower in one system.
- Looking at the T3e range of machines, we see that that the T3e was a very
- scaleable architecture. The systems can be grown by adding boards of 4 or
- 8 processors during a maintenance slot. However adding boards does require
- some rewiring of the interconnect torus and takes a few hours.
-
- There would be various reasons why a limit is set on the upper size of a T3E.
- I am not sure which of the following played a part in the upper size limit
- of a T3e but here are the ideas.
-
- Physical size limits: 1048 CPUs, the largest known configuration, would fill 8
- system cabinets and beyond that the distance across the frame could have adverse
- timing influences on the clock circuits. The clock was carried from cab to cab
- using Fibre optic circuits. The physically bigger a system gets the longer it
- takes to co-ordinate the parts. Which is why computers get denser by preference
- rather than larger. Seymour Cray always concentrated on making smaller denser
- machines rather than larger ones with more in because of this factor.
-
- Power and cooling: not really a limit, bigger, hotter machines had been built
- by Cray in the past. However beyond certain wattage very special and usually
- expensive power and cooling arrangements have to be made and this will contribute
- to large infrastructure and running costs.
-
- Reliability: Because of the tightly bound interconnect of the machine, very much
- tighter than nodes on a network, the failure of any CPU or board power supply
- could kill the machine. If you had a CPU/power supply combination that fails once
- randomly distributed in 50 years (50*52=2600weeks) / 2176cpus = 1.19 So you can
- expect to see a failure just over once a week. Building a board that fails less
- than once in 50 years is hard but a system failure once a week is unacceptable.
- Driving up that reliability curve for the machines was something that the
- engineers battled with during the development of the system. Having "Spare" CPUs
- ready to map in limited the down time associated with a CPU/cpu failure but it
- still took time to locate the point of failure and map around it. A system
- running weather predictions to a tight time scale could not afford to have random
- 2..4 hour failures once a week. After an initial burn-in period boards do not
- fail randomly but you can see that the more cpus/parts there are the less
- reliable a machine will tend to be.
-
- Operating System scaleability: The T3e is a single system image machine, even
- though parts of it are distributed between processors, there is only one copy of
- the operating system, process table memory map etc. A "normal" SMP type
- architecture will struggle once the number of active processes exceeds 2000 and
- it has the advantage of uniform access to all its memory map. The T3E has to cope
- with just as many processes with the extra strain of them all running in
- parallel. The scheduling was made easier by dividing the processors into
- application pools and by treating a group of processors working on a single task
- as a single job but controlling the machine gets harder the more parallel
- elements there are to co-ordinate. The bigger the machine the more likely it is
- that you will hit a situation where much of the machine is pounding on a single
- part of the machine that runs a critical resource. The cost of having that a big
- machine all waiting on the completion of a single task limits the scaleability of
- the system. E.g. Root filesystem inode contention, process table interactions
- etc. These and other throttle points limit the scaleability of any operating
- system.
-
- Market demand: The amount of CPU horse power you can get out of one CPU was such
- that most problems fitted into 50..100 CPUs before the program bogs down waiting
- on I/O or system resources. If you have 40 lots of 50 CPU programs to run you
- would have a more reliable solution having 2 * 1000 CPU boxes. The demand to run
- 2000 CPU problems just is not large enough to cover the extra costs of building
- them.
-
-
- What was the Cray connection with Apple ?
-
- Cray and Apple, seemly at opposite ends of the computer spectrum, do have
- some subtle links. It was known that Seymour Cray used an Apple desktop some
- of the time when designing the Cray-2. It is also known that Apple had a
- sequence of Cray machines starting in March 1986 with an XMP/28 followed by
- another XMP in Feb 1991. A YMP-2E arrived later in 1991 and finally an EL
- from Dec 1993 to Jun 98. It is said that Apple's first XMP was bought by
- Steve Jobs after he just walked into the Cray facility in Mendota Hights.
-
- 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."
-
- 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 T3e 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.
-
- According to a CCC inside source Seymour Cray and the Cray Computer
- Corporation used Macintosh desktop computers almost exclusivly for
- work on the Cray-3 and Cray-4 projects. Much of such work was just
- moving text and graphic files arround on a shared network.
-
- 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 there 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.
-
- The popular Macintosh telnet program developed by NCSA has an icon which
- is an XMP surrounded by a network with Macs. NCSA had a Cray
- accessed by Macs and thus needed to develop such a program.
- NCSA = National Centre for Supercomputer Applications.
-
-
-
- How many people worked for Cray Research
-
- This compiled from various SEC 10-K documents.
-
- As of December 31, 1995, the Company had 4,225 full-time employees; 83 in
- development and engineering, 1,399 in manufacturing, 763 in marketing and
- sales, 915 in field service and 165 in general management and administrative
- positions.
-
- As of December 31, 1994, the Company had 4,840 full-time employees;1,172 in
- development and engineering, 1,531 in manufacturing, 849 in marketing and
- sales, 1,075 in field service and 213 in general management and
- administrative positions.
-
- As of December 31, 1993, the Company had 4,960 full-time employees: 1082 in
- development and engineering, 1798 in manufacturing, 728 in marketing and
- sales, 1157 in field service and 195 in general management and
- administrative positions.
-
- Cray Research Growth Table
-
- YearEmployees Locations USA/International New Systems Installed systems
- 1972 12 1 0 0
- 1973 24 2 0 0
- 1974 29 2 0 0
- 1975 42 2 0 0
- 1976 24 4 1 1
- 1977 199 6 / 1 3 4
- 1978 321 8 / 1 5 8
- 1979 524 10 / 3 6 13
- 1980 761 13 / 4 9 22
- 1981 1079 16 / 4 13 35
- 1982 1352 17 / 4 15 50
- 1983 1551 18 / 6 16 65
- 1984 2203 20 / 8 23 84
- 1985 3180 22 / 10 28 108
- 1986 3999 28 / 12 35 138
- 1987 4308 34 / 13 43 113
- 1988 5237 35 / 18 52 220
- 1989 4708 32 / 18 57 240
- 1990 4857 34 / 18 52 263
- 1991 5395 35 / 21 71 309
- 1992 4895 446
- 1993 4960 6 + 153600 ft^2 Leased 505
- 1994 4840 6 + 190600 ft^2 Leased 638
- 1995 4225 6 + 211100 ft^2 Leased
-
- Data from Cray Research via www.cbi.umn.edu.
-
- CCC had 350 workers at the time of its closure in 1995.
-
- Who ran Cray Research ?
-
- CEOs of Cray Research
-
- Who Dates Where are they now ?
- John Rollwagen 1976..1992 Now is a "Venture Partner" at Paul Venture
- Capital in St. Paul, Minnesota
- Marcello Gummucio 1992..1994 Now at BeOS ?
- John F. Carlson Jan 1993..1994
- Robert Ewald Dec 1994..1996 Now at Estamp an internet venture selling
- snailmail postage over the web.
- J. Phillip Samper May 1995.. ? ?
- Irene Qualters ?
-
- Mr. Ewald ... joined the Company (SGI) in 1996 as President of Cray Research
- and a Senior Vice President of the Company. Mr. Ewald was the President and
- Chief Operating Officer of Cray Research, Inc. from 1994 until 1996, when
- Cray was acquired by the Company. Prior to that, he was Chief Operating
- Officer of Cray's Supercomputer Operations and in 1993 served as Executive
- Vice President and General Manager, Supercomputer Operations. From 1991
- through 1993, Mr. Ewald was Cray's Executive Vice President, Development.
- His daughter worked for part of the Craysoft organisation.
-
- Les Davis can certainly be considered one of the spritual leaders of the
- traditional Crayons.
-
- Was a Cray supercomputer value for money ?
-
- The utilization of most of the 16 cpu C90 systems I ever saw approached 98%
- at most sites, month after month, year after year so despite the high,
- typically USD 30,000,000 price customers got value for money.
-
- Warning salesmen maths ahead, full of apples=oranges assumptions but go with
- me for while...
-
- Lets work it out over 6 years the typical life of a C90. USD 30,000,000
- purchase price + 3,000,000 * 6 Per year service cost = USD 54,000,000 total.
- That would be 9,000,000 per year over 365 days = USD 24,657 per day for the
- system. Per CPU that would be approx. USD 1,541 per day. In that day on that
- one CPU you could do 1 Gigaflop/s * 24 * 3600 * 98 % = 84,672,000,000,000
- Flops in the day.
-
- C90 Cost per 10^6 flops = 154,100 / 84,672,000 = 0.0018 cents per MFlops
-
- Think that a workstation in 1994 would cost you approx. USD 8,000 + 800 PA
- and would be obsolete in 3 years. So that is USD 10,400 total or 4366.6 PA.
- Per day that's USD 12. Typically workstations are person driven, and people
- work 9 to 5 - 1 hours in a day, 5 days out of 7 that's a 40/168 = 23 %
- utilisation. Workstations in 1994 could manage about 5 Mflops/s on real
- codes. So the workload works out at 5,000,000 * 24 * 3600 * 23% =
- 99,360,000,000 Flops in a day.
-
- PC Cost per 10^6 flops = 1200 / 99,360 = 0.012 cents per MFlop.
-
- So it is cheaper to work things out on a C90 than a workstation just as long
- as you have enough work to keep it busy. We won't go into the fact that you
- can run much bigger problems on the C90 or that you can get the same work
- done faster as we seem to have won this point already.
-
- Did Cray fail? It was bought out by SGI in 1996
-
- No. Cray dominated, after inventing the super computing marketplace, for 20
- years. Cray was *the* name in high performance scientific and engineering
- computing. Cray did seem to lose the technology focus in the later part of
- the '90s, the T90 was too expensive to build, the T3e cost too much to
- develop and the DEC deal scuppered the chances of world domination in
- departmental compute servers but there is no doubt that the sheer quantity
- of engineering and science completed on Cray hardware changed the face of
- the 20th century.
-
- So did Cray Research fail? No. Whilst relatively few machines were ever made,
- even of the more popular models, they provided an unrivalled platform for
- tackling the toughest computational problems, which is of course, the mission of
- Cray Research. In March 2000 the Cray Research name and business was sold by SGI
- to Tera Inc, the inovative supercomputer maker from Seattle. Tera inc have now
- changed their name to Cray inc and continute to develop, service and inovate Cray
- computers.
-
- Whats happening now ?
-
- Since the join up Cray inc have delivered the SV-1 and X1 traditional vector super
- computers,
- sealed a deal with one-time rival NEC to market the sx-6 and serviced the MTA line.
- There
- have also been developments in the Linux cluster areas leeding on to this recent
- announcement.
-
- In October 2003, Cray Inc. announced plans to create a product line based on the
- "Red Storm" 40-TeraOp (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer it is
- developing for Sandia National Laboratories. Red Storm is a supercomputer system
- leveraging over 10,000 AMD Opteron(tm) processors connected by an innovative
- high-speed,
- high-bandwidth 3D mesh interconnect designed by Cray. See http://www.cray.com for
- more details.
-
-
-
- Trademark Disclaimer and copyright notice
-
- Thank you for taking time to read these important notes.
-
- Cray, Cray Research, CRI, XMP, YMP, C90, T90, J90, T3d, T3e, Unicos, plus
- other words and logos used in this document are trademarks which belong to
- Silicon Graphics Inc. and others. There is nothing generic about a Cray
- supercomputer.
-
- Some of the ideas described in this document are subject to patent law or
- are registered inventions. Description here does not place these ideas and
- techniques in the public domain.
-
- I wrote this document with input from a number of sources, but I get both
- the credit and the blame for its content. I am happy to read your polite
- correction notes and may even integrate them with the text so please
- indicate if you require an acknowledgement.
-
- Personal use of this document is free but if you wish to redistribute this
- document, in whole or in part, for commercial gain, you must obtain
- permission from and acknowledge the author.
-
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Things to do: Detailed machine type specs, URls and links to resources, War
- stories - Time warp, Fixed on site, T3e OS internals, T3e logical to
- physical, T3e go faster bits express message queues, Multi CPU Process
- relocation, How to program, vectorisation, macro tasking, micro tasking,
- auto tasking, Large memory, expand ccc, expand SPARC superserver.
- Contributions please ...
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Dec 2003 V1.1.0
-
- Copyright (c) 1999 by "Fred Gannett", all rights reserved.
- This FAQ may be posted to any appropriate USENET newsgroup, on-line service, web
- site, or BBS as long as it is posted in its entirety and includes this copyright
- statement.
- This FAQ may be distributed as class material on diskette or CD-ROM as long as there
- is no charge (except to cover materials).
- This FAQ may not be distributed for financial gain except to the author.
- This FAQ may not be included in commercial collections or compilations without
- express permission from the author.
-
- Downloaded from Gannett's home page www.SpikyNorman.net
-
-