Sujet : Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
De : mitchalsup (at) *nospam* aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
Groupes : comp.archDate : 20. May 2025, 17:59:37
Autres entêtes
Organisation : Rocksolid Light
Message-ID : <cc6e45535e0aee6667e3c50e0527668a@www.novabbs.org>
References : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
User-Agent : Rocksolid Light
On Tue, 20 May 2025 10:45:18 +0000, Michael S wrote:
On Mon, 19 May 2025 23:58:16 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
On Mon, 19 May 2025 16:55:49 +0300, Michael S wrote:
>
On Mon, 19 May 2025 01:56:50 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
They were orders of magnitude faster than anything from IBM.
>
That sounds like exaggeration.
>
Thomas Watson Jr, boss of IBM, sent out the following memo after the
1963 Business Week feature on CDC and the forthcoming 6600:
>
Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they
officially announced their 6600 system. I understand that in the
laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people,
including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are
programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior
programmer. Contrasting this modest effort with our own vast
development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our
industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the
world’s most powerful computer.
>
>
At time of introduction CDC 6600 was undoubtedly much faster both than
older [more expensive] IBM 7030 and than contemporary [significantly
less expensive] S/360 Model 50. But it was not "orders of magnitude
faster".
Perhaps a full binary order of magnitude:: 2×
Not even one order of magnitude faster, except, may be, vs
Model 50 in artificial very memory-light floating-point intensive
scenarios.
High end S/360 (Model 65) came about half a year later. I would imagine
that for non-floating-point code it had about the same speed as 6600.
Or not, I don't really know.
>
They pioneered the very concept of a “supercomputer”.
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch
>
Let’s just say, the 7030 was just the start of a long IBM tradition
of over-promising and under-delivering.
>
It is true that IBM was over-promising und under-delivering with 7030.
It does not change the fact that it was called "supercomputer" and that
despite under-delivery until introduction of 6600 it was the fastest
computer in the world.
The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers