[geeks] DaveM: Crays up?

[Dave McGuire]

On Sunday, November 24, 2002, at 04:06 AM, William S. wrote:
> Assuming you were to have your Cray(s) up and
> running. Would it be "Nifty" to offer your
> machine time to companies, schools, individuals
> to do work and maybe charge for this?
> I don't know how you would set it up and
> determine a fee structure but it would
> at least justify keeping up the power
> on a 24/7.

   Timesharing on supercomputers is common, and their OSs have very 
capable resource accounting capabilities built in...you bill by the CPU 
second and perhaps by storage used...that's old hat.  The trouble would 
be when Cray finds out that I'm making money with it...then I'll start 
getting phone calls from their lawyers wanting to know when I bought 
the Unicos license.

   I would like to do it commercially eventually, but only when I can 
afford to buy the OS license, which costs about $10K.  By then I'll 
probably have a faster machine like a T90 or something, though...The 
J90 is plenty fast by today's standards (200MFLOPS per processor, 
sustained, at 64-bit precision) but by the time I get around to doing 
this, it'll probably be able to be beaten by the latest IBM POWER and 
perhaps MIPS processors.

> Is there such thing as a "shell" on a Cray
> and a "shell account" being an option?

   Modern Crays run Unicos, a SysV-based UNIX operating system.  You log 
into it and get a UNIX shell prompt.  It's every bit the same as a 
"normal" average-speed (not particularly fast) UNIX system, except when 
you copy files it's damn-near instantaneous, and when you run a program 
which is compiled to use vector instructions it takes off with stupid 
amounts of speed.

> If one were to set up a "Cluster" of boxes
> and have them available for work, what would
> be the optimal hardware and OS?
>
> I would say VAXen and OpenVMS (just for the coolness).

   Well, and the reliability, and the clustering capabilities.  People 
whose opinions I value tell me that Linux is decent for low-latency 
clustering (well, for varying definitions of "clustering") so that 
might be an option as well, though I can't speak from experience there.

           -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                 "You don't have Vaseline in Canada?"
St. Petersburg, FL                     -Bill Bradford