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Subject: Re: Crafty and fastest Cray: question to Bob

Author: Ernst A. Heinz

Date: 10:40:28 12/01/97

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On December 01, 1997 at 12:44:54, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On December 01, 1997 at 10:00:54, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:
>
>>On December 01, 1997 at 09:23:00, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>> [...] but getting machine time on a 16 cpu alpha is child's-play
>>> compared to getting machine time on a T90...
>>
>>Well, the largest DEC Alpha SMPs I have heard of contain 12 CPUs
>>and there are really not that many out there ... :-(
>>
>>Only DEC Alpha SMPs with 4 CPUs are widely available.
>>
>>=Ernst=
>
>our DEC rep has a 20 CPU version in a price-list he's looked at.

Yes, in price-lists you find them but I have not yet heard of any such
machine having been installed outside DEC or some other "hideous"
corporation.

>In addition, there are some non-disclosure things going on at DEC's lab
>that I can't say anything about.

I thought we were talking about "general availability" ... :-)

>But needless to say, on the high-end
>lots is going on.  IE the SGI folks have large numbers of processors
>(MIPS R10000's), Sun has a fair number (although the ultrasparc is
>annoyingly slow), IBM has the SP for the PPC chips, so don't expect
>Digital to lag too far back.  :)

True, but SGI's and Sun's machines scale to more processors only because
each single CPU is so much slower than a high-end 21164a-Alpha. DEC's
problem here is good communication/computation *balance*.

>And then there is the Cray T3 series of machines, with a *bunch* of
>alphas interconnected.  (bunch == >1024)...  not exactly shared memory
>of course, but usable...

Sure, very usable indeed but not easier to get computing time on than on
a Cray vector supercomputer. BTW, there exist several T3x machines with
<= 256 processors but not really many with 512 or >= 1024 processors.

But I'd really like to have a large Cray T3E-1200 with lots of 600MHz
Alpha-21164a CPUs for running a distributed/parallel version of
DarkThought ... :-)

=Ernst=



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