The HCC's Road Trip to Cray Research

Disclaimer:

The HCC is related in no way with Cray Research, other then the fact that we would REALLY like to have one of their machines. The official Cray Research WWW page is here. The relation of the information below to reality is highly questionable.

The HCC homepage is here.


This is Jon Doroin standing beside a Cray T3D. It has 3000 Dec Alpha processors arranged in a three dimensional torus (hence the name). Jon features a wet-ware processor with several million neurons arranged in a neural network.

This is a Cray YMP. This specific one was one of the first prototypes.

This is a cray 2, which is actually a rather old model. The entire processor is submerged in coolant. (the YMP's have the coolant flowing through heat exchangers) The thing to the right in the background is the coolant reservoir, the thing on the left is the heat exchanger.

This is a heat exchanger. It moves heat from the florinert which flows through the processor to freon, which is cheaper. Florinert was developed by 3M as a blood plasma substitute, and can hold oxygen very well (so if you put fish in your cray, they would probably survive for a while). It also costs about $250 per gallon.

This is a C90, until recently, the most powerful cray you could get. The T90 replaced it.

This is a pair of tape drives. They hold about one Terra byte each, and have a worst case access time of 30 seconds.

The machine on the left is the console of a cray. It is actually a sizeable Sun workstation. The box in the middle is a smaller sun, which runs the big orange light. People who are logged in from home can blink the light if they need the operators to do something (instead of hanging up the modem, and calling back voice).

This is the first group photo.
(from the left:)Jon Doroin, Tim Berdahl, John Walsh, Glen Overby (who works for Cray), Chris Larter, Tommy Johnson

This is the second group photo.
(from the left:) (from the left:)Jon Doroin, Tim Berdahl, John Walsh, Glen Overby (who works for Cray), Chris Larter, Chadwick A. Dubuque


We would like to thank Glen Overby for getting us a tour, and Chuck Swanson for giving us the tour.