[Info-vax] HPE and supercomputing.

[Scott Dorsey]

Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) <helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de> wrote:
>In article <r3uald$mhn$1 at panix2.panix.com>, kludge at panix.com (Scott
>Dorsey) writes: 
>
>> We won't touch the current Cray hardware (although we were once a very large
>> customer of theirs) because the Cray interconnect is proprietary and while
>> it may have lower latency than Infinband or Ethernet, it's not possible to
>> run the Cray clusters without the Cray software distribution and that means
>> paying through the nose for support.
>
>In the old days, when you bought a Cray, didn't it come with pilots, 
>i.e. people who ran it?

Sort of.  We had an X-MP, a Y-MP, and a Cray-2 on site at one point, and we got
an FE assigned to the facility to do maintenance.

The actual system administration was done by our staff (who were idiots, 
which is why we wound up getting rid of the systems).

Later on we had some J90s and wound up sharing an FE with the rest of the 
state, just like we did with Sun and SGI.

These days budgets are a lot tigher than they were back then, and also whereas
we had a dozen idiots running the Cray, we now have a building with hundreds
of idiots managing desktop Windows machines.  It costs a lot to keep all those
people on staff so there is very little money available to actually do work.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."