[Info-vax] OT: Intel dusts off old supercomputing technology

[Michael Moroney]

Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:

> The days VMS was used for raw number crunching are long gone
> (did it ever make it in the upper half of the Top 500 ?)
> and somehow I doubt that it was better suited for this
> purpose than any other OS.

FWIW, I didn't imply VAXen were among the largest systems when I meant
"number cruncher".  I know DEC sold them as "minicomputers" not mainframes,
other than perhaps the VAX 9000.  I simply meant used for scientific type
computing.

It might be interesting to see where a theoretical cluster of 96 nodes of
the most powerful Itanics or Alphas available, each with as many CPUs as
supported, fall in the rankings.  Probably not too high since I know there
are true number crunchers of thousands of CPUs out there, but such a 
cluster would be an awful large single login point.  And not that I ever
expect such a cluster will ever be built.