How does a CRAY supercomputer work?

Question

I mean, is it acutally an entire computer itself, or is it sort of like a device attached to a PC and is accessed through interface programs? I mean, could I just like, install Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 on it and play? Just curious. Am coming across a large sum of money and am contemplating purchasing one slightly used by the local college.

Answer 1

It's a bespoke, highly specialised bit of computing equipment... though five or ten gigabit networked Pentium-4s with the right software could probably outrun it with ease. It's all housed in some big networked cabinets with many, many individual co-processing CPUs and an absolute PILE of memory, with some kind of modest terminal (or optionally, many many time-sharing terminals) attached. The best way to think of it is an old university or government insititution mainframe.

Any that you can buy for your PC-upgrading pocket change won't be good for much any more - in fact if a local college is getting rid of it, you can be sure it's past it and they've run it basically until it's no longer reliable any more (never mind competitively powerful; so long as it runs the programs they want at original speed, they don't care; i've seen happily running college computer rooms full of 486s as recently as 2003) .... as their budgets for buying such equipment are often laughably small, and you may well be funding a major part of it's replacement's cost.

And no......... you almost certainly won't be able to interface it with your regular PC in any meaningful manner. You might be able to "telnet" into it over a network cable (running a text-based terminal screen) to control what it does and collect raw data to be interpreted by display programs on your "terminal", perhaps even port a copy of Folding @ Home onto it, but it's not going to be any cop for games.

Besides, the thing's collectively going to be the size of a comfortably specified camper van and require a few kilowatts of power. Where would you stow it and how would you plug it in (or pay for the electricity)?

Answer 2

A Cray supercompute is just a computer like your PC. The big difference is that it uses a different CPU, memory, motherboard, hard drive, etc. etc. then your PC does. It also has a different operating system than Windows. Half Life, Doom, Microsoft Office, etc. were all written to run on Microsoft Windows. The only programs you can run on a Cray are programs written for a Cray. I'm sure there's a way you could hack Linux to run on a Cray or Half Life for that matter, but I'm not aware of anyone doing that yet.

Answer 3

Yes, but compared to today's standards, CRAY is old news!
The BlueGene/L is the most powerful computer in existence.
Although they may have differences in power, they are both structured the same way. The BlueGene is structured the same way any home computer is.
It has multiple CPU's (your computer has just one) linked together on a rack-about 10-20. Each unit has about 20 racks and there are over 100 units linked together, so when you add it all up, the BlueGene is a few hundred thousand times more powerful than yuor average desktop!
But that's not all; what really matters is whether the computer is structured for image processing or mathematical calculations.
The BlueGene is being used for protein modeling, however-it is rumoured that it is secretly being used to build human DNA (as thought by conspiracy theorists) and consequently build an artificial human (without any human intervention)
Good Link!:
http://www.IInI.gov/asci/platforms/bluegeneI/
BlueGene's Government site

and Cray if you're interested
http://www.cray.com/

Answer 4

very fast.

what model? Cray-1, Cray-2, X-MP, Y-MP?

Crays were originally designed by a fellow named Seymour Cray who is thought of as the father of super computing. Started a company called Cray Research. This company later merged with Silicon Graphics in the mid 90's

These are multi-million dollar machines and have their own proprietary architecture.

As far as playing a game on it ... hmmm ... not knowing what model .. i am inclined to think not. Why? because game executables are created by compiling and linking source code on a specific machine.

The binary code for the pc or the mac would not be compatible.

PS.
most Cray's ran some variant of the unix OS, you might be able to dowload source code for games an compile it for the Cray.

Answer 5

It needs a plug and electricity....

Answer 6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray
http://www.cray.com/

Answer 7

ok