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Cray 2 for sale?

D

dracos

Experienced Member
Joined
May 4, 2011
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Location
Northern VA - USA
From the "Vintage Computer" discussion on linkedin:

Crays for sale...

I know someone unloading a large number of vintage cray supercomputers... if anyone has an interest shoot me a message or post here. Just a heads up the smallest big iron box clocks in around 2k lbs, largest is around 15k lbs. These do not have boards in them. Scrap value on most boxes starts around $10k and go up from there due to amount of gold, silver etc.

Also a number of later air cooled boxes available. Some of these complete and could be brought back up.
18 hours ago

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?v...wBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_83450786
 
dracos said:
Also a number of later air cooled boxes available. Some of these complete and could be brought back up.
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Bringing one up (even one has the gallons of Fuorinert around) was not trivial when the new system was delivered, tested, from Cray. I can't even begin to imagine how hard this would be using scavenged boards, even if one has all of the special jigs and tools needed for board-level repair.
 
There's an operational Cray at Bletchley in the UK - restored by a teenager (according to the tour guide) who'd spent a huge amount of time on it.
 
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pearce_jj said:
There's an operational Cray at Bletchley in the UK - restored by a teenager (according to the tour guide) who'd spent a huge amount of time on it.
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A Cray 2 ("Bubbles") is very different from a Cray-1, or say, a Cray X-MP. The latter use more-or-less standard construction, but Bubbles is a very different animal.
 
I'm interested too.

I just applied for membership to that Vintage Computer group on Linked In as well as a few others on there.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Speaking of non-Cray Crays, does anyone know what happened to Steve Chen after he moved to China? The world hasn't exactly been overrun with Chinese supercomputers...
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I think he discovered time travel while doing R&D and came back as a younger person who then founded Youtube!

Actually I think he started this:

http://www.galactic.com.hk/aboutus_history.htm

Looks like they are just making super computers using off the shelf blade servers.
 
I've been a bit miffed ever since the vast majority of new supercomputers started getting built out of run-of-the-mill off-the-shelf rackmount and blade servers connected via Infiniband running Linux.

I realize the cost savings, economies of scale, and fast build-out time, but to me it just seems like anyone with a couple million bucks can slap together a supercomputer, and short of a few, the glory days of custom big iron hardware like the early Crays are looooong gone.

Probably a subject for another thread and even so, I realize I'm just blowing steam :)
 
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The custom built machines served their purpose, but I think masses of multi cored X86 chips are pretty much it for super computing to come. I wonder if they will ever do a special type of super processesor with a million GPU chips.
 
As much as I like to rescue a Cray 2 the Mrs. would divorce me on the spot... I hope they don't go to scrappers!
 
The long-awaited 100-core Tilera TileGx comes sorta close...at least for x86.

Unknown_K said:
The custom built machines served their purpose, but I think masses of multi cored X86 chips are pretty much it for super computing to come. I wonder if they will ever do a special type of super processesor with a million GPU chips.
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For me, the Cray thing is more about design philosophy and personality, in much the same way that cooking might be.

Seymour was about pushing the technology to its limits and beyond. His Cray 3 design was way ahead of its time, but you could see that a CPU with a 2nsec. cycle time made with GaAs logic was really pushing state of the art.

Chen was all about parallel processing--and the X-MP and Y-MP were great successes, but it wasn't Seymour's way.

Jim Thornton put together the CDC 6400, which was a serial version of the 6600 while the 6600 was being shaken out. The 6400 was much cheaper and easier to build and turned in perhaps 1/3-1/2 of the 6600 and it resulted in a lot of sales. Thornton went on to do the STAR, which was 'way out in vectorland and heavily microprogrammed. Not Seymour's way at all, but notable in its direction. The Cray-1 had vector registers, but it was very simple compared to the massive complexity of the STAR.

So designs show personality. For Seymour, it was working around that problem of hands-apart-about a-foot "This is a nanosecond".

Just illustrates quite graphically that there's more than one way to skin a cat.
 
They're pretty much useless (not to mention worthless) without their boards. Someone's just an a**hole, that's all.

Some of these complete and could be brought back up.
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With the boards removed? Good luck finding and installing them again.
 
I said the same thing. I don't get how they're $10,000 with the boards removed. Wouldn't they just be empty racks at that point?

NeXT said:
They're pretty much useless (not to mention worthless) without their boards. Someone's just an a**hole, that's all.


With the boards removed? Good luck finding and installing them again.
Click to expand...
 
Not even that because a 19" rack can at least accomidate other hardware. Most cray systems didn't use racks until later on so most of the systems will be pretty much the value of the steel.
If anyone offered a Cray 2 (I can't click the link by the way because I don't have a linkedin account) with no boards I'd tell them $200 or get bent because you'd have a cool looking frame but windows exposing an otherwise empty inside.
 
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