[rescue] Cray J90s

[Dave McGuire]

On June 11, Zach Malone wrote:
>     This list seems to be a little more varied in types of hardware then I thought it would be when I joined the list, however, I noticed that some people have posted crays up for sale on eBay, no real steals though.
> http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1245498968
> http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1244448223

  Actually, they're both real steals in the grand scheme of things.
The supercomputer secondary market is a very, very strange thing.  If
anyone here is really interested, I'd be happy to explain why these
two (and the third) systems aren't selling worth a damn on eBay, in
spite of being relisted over and over at lower and lower prices.

> They are both J90s though, and at those prices, a dual Athlon system will exceed them in gigflops per dollar, and total gigaflops.  (Two 1.4ghz Athlons would get you about 4 gigaflops).

  *bzzzt*

  Nope.  There's more to life than megahertz (as I'm betting you
already know) and a gigaflop isn't necessarily a gigaflop.  And
further...even when a gigaflop IS a gigaflop, and gigaflops are
important, there's a lot more to supercomputer performance than
gigaflops.

  An overclocked PeeCee does not a vector supercomputer make.


                 -Dave McGuire