Booting a Cray Superserver 6400 at The Jim Austin Computer Collection
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- This is one of a pair of machines that came from a large insurance company. It was purchased in the mid 1990s to calculate insurance quotes.
It had suffered a small amount of damage before it reached us, but a couple of fixes and it booted fairly cleanly. Two of its sixty Sparc processors aren't running, but other than that all is well.
This Cray, one of a pair, was named Ronnie. There are no prizes for guessing the name of the second machine.
www.computermus...
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Music:
Holle Mangler - Out Of Cray
freemusicarchi... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
There is a great fascination with these old IT machines: It's like bringing a dead human computer back to life. His brain begins to interact and react again - and to change his environment. The old facility of IT is coming back to life. That's fantastic.
Can I have some more, please ! Long live IT - IT lives forever! ! !
I love your metaphor for this, I agree. It’s truly amazing what us humans as a species have been able to accomplish in a relatively short time (40 years at the time of this computer’s creation!) since the first computer in the 1940s. Even if it isn’t as powerful compared to our modern day computers, this beast of a machine is still a technical marvel. So complex in its design and infrastructure, that if you were to show this to the computer scientists in the 40s, they would be absolutely stunned, especially if you told them it would be built 40 years from now.
“Time travel exists; it only goes one way.”
Thanks for bringing back the memories. I stated working at Sun in 1995 as a field engineer. I got trained on that machine in 1997: the big E10K. Oh the stories we can tell you about that machine. Was PITA to install took about 2 days; and when it booted - wholly shit was it loud. The back plane was heavy too, something like 16 layer PCB it was massive. Was too heavy for me to pull it out myself, always had someone help me. Sun bought this machine and it's resources from SGI and we made boat loads of money on this thing (i know i've installed many) and they easily went for 1 million plus. Doing clustering between domains as also challenging add lucrative: add another 1/2 mill and 3 more days of install time. But, to be honest - Sun should have never bought it, the problems we had with it. We lost some huge accounts due to its reliability, recall Sun didn't engineer it; we only added a name plate and Solaris. I do remember fondly this machine. There where many a nights in some data center installing and configuring the E10K. Long live cosmic rays.
We ran SETI@home on an E10k circa 1998. It was a cluster of 4 for the Blockbuster website (!) that were temporarily in our offices.....
I don't remember replacing that many CPUs in the E10k (I think they had the e-cache parity error figured out by then or they had moved on to the faster >400MHz CPUs), but I replaced dozens and dozens on Ex000 and Ex500 machines (I still remember the part number for the 400MHz CPUs and Ex000 system boards.) And I think I only replaced one E10k centerplane.
Beautiful piece of history. Sometimes i wish we can go back to the early days of computers and technology.
This Cray 2 Supercomputer only has 1.9 gigaflops or 0.0019 teraflops, a Samsung Galaxy S23 can have over 3600 gigaflops or 3.6 teraflops, insane. 🙀
If you do, don't forget to show your modern smartphone to them.
This Cray 2 Supercomputer is so weak that it can't even run Minecraft on the lowest possible settings.
*boots louder than a jet taking off*
'make sure the fans are running'
not sure thats needed
What's that? Type louder I can't here you over the bleeding fans!!!!
Depends on how long you've been near the fans to begin with...
Isn't this supposed to be liquid-cooled?
@@Sarah.Riedel it can be both depending on the config some used liquid and some used fans if memory serves
Wow. I was a dba on that actual machine. Even remembers the labels. Happy days!!
Did that one CPU kick the bucket before decommissioning? I swear the damage to the circuit breaker looked intentional.
Hi Nigel
Just seen this post!! I can vouch that you was the chief DBA :^)
Ray K
@@Nighthawke70 The CS6400 (Ronnie) chasis you see in the video was only part populated while in production for Churchill Insurance. Components from the other CS6400 chasis (Reggie) was stripped out to make one fully loaded CS6400 you see in the video.
The systems were fully operational with no damage when they were decommisioned - I know as I was the person decomissioning them and having to find a new home for them.
A guy who was part of a Cray Interest Group eventually took Ronnie + loads of spares/components for a private collection, which they hoped to house a the Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, but that never seemed to materialised.
Pleased to see that it has ended up at Jim Austin's Computer Collection, hope to drop in one day when in the area!!
@@raykingdon6909what a small world.
This is a very good use of electrons
When Cray was purchased by SGI, and while SGI analyzed what it had just bought, it found this quirky little division in San Diego building things with Sparc processors and working closely with Sun Microsystems. SGI didn't really want to keep the group, considering that it clashed with the sorts of technologies that SGI was already producing. So they gladly sold the group off to Sun for about $50 million. Sun liked what the engineers were doing and how their computer systems worked, so it gladly acquired the division just as it was about to complete its follow-on to the CS6400: the Ultra Enterprise Server 10000 (also known as the Starfire).
I thought this Cray looked familiar. I worked on a Starfire for a few years around 2000. I knew a lot of it was based on Cray tech they had bought but I didn't realize how similar the machines were.
Xu Chao nah this cray is technically a sun Microsystems machine with the cray name on it.... other cray stuff can be aloy different.
I worked down the street from the Cray building. It was on Deer Park Drive in Mira Mesa / Sorrento Valley :)
And today, the crappy company known as Oracle have wrecked most of the good stuff that was in Sun...
The good news is that the ZFS did survive at least, especially now that Oracle is burrying that too.
I worked on a few different Cray Super Computers for the EPA back in the 90s, A Cray YMP, A Cray c90-4 and a Cray MPP. The cooling and plumbing necessary to run them was as impressive as the electronics were. Those were the days.
They still are impressive, although I can't say I have any experience.
8 gigs.. like the surface I'm watching this on. Crazy...
Thinkpad x220i for me. I also have a Surface Pro but it's only 4gb.
My home PC has 32Gb. And I never used it for something more then youtube, Quake and photo processing.
Some would say it's even CRAY-zee
It actually supports 16GB fully populated however.
8 GB was large at that time, but this was no DDR and had reading freq. like ass
The music hahaha so dramatic, love it 👍
I was a VAX and PDP guy at DEC. Boy did we lust after the Cray boxes.
3:25 It remains me at "Jurassic park", where "Dennis Nedry" startet to shut down the electric park fences.
Greetings from germany
All of this makes me really happy.
From the golden age of business- and supercomputing.
These things should be preserved as they are important examples of computing history. We must realise how low on the evolutionary curve we still were with computational technology just 25 years ago (and still probably are now). I still like old IBM 360s- and I was only about 6 when they were current 😀
I love the soundtrack playing the background, so inspiring!
Holle mangler "out off cray"
I worked for Cray Research for several years. This has Cray’s name on it, but it isn’t one of his computers.
This music is an art exactly represent this marvelous piece
Cray should have gone into the PC market.
I met mr. cray and moved some of his computers many years ago when I used to work as a mover.
I would have loved to have talked to him.
oooooo geekgasm! :)
what a nice wee machine - could play with the cray all day.
thanks for posting mate!
It's basically a 32bit Sun Enterprise 10000. Originally they ran Cray Solaris which was a custom build that went beyond the capabilities of the SparcCenter Sun4d series architecture. I see this one is running Solaris 2.6 which is more current than what they originally ran which was either based on 2.2 or 2.3.
Yup -- I used to install/work on E10Ks for a living. The SSP software operates identically between the E10K and CS6400 from what I can tell. Starting with Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 you didn't need special add-ins for the CS6400, the base OS came with all the appropriate kernel modules and tools. The SSP software is unobtanium these days, AFAIK.
Very nice clean crt trinitron branded by sun
when you through the switch the power dropped here in LA. It's reminds me of the old dec's
Really an amazing machine. Can you do (or have you done?) a basic walkthrough video?
8706 of ram in 97 not bad.
Pretty sweet back then indeed. Watching this on a phone with the same amount today.
8704*
Dou you have a video without this "soundtrack" in the foreground? I like the sounds these machines make, no other sounds required to put them in the background...
8704 megs of memory? oh yeah.. twisted pair.. sheesh what a dino... that would have been so much fun!!!! Thanks for the share guys.. even thought it was 3 years ago now...
So when do we get velociraptors?
I knew I was getting too old when the supercomputer model numbers began to be recycled: Everyone knows the 6400 is really a CDC product, not a Cray computer.
I had that exact monitor back in the 90s
I'm guessing this one was equipped with SuperSPARC II processors if it was purchased mid 90's.
I like the background music.
Fully loaded, the CS6400 would accept 64 processors (60Mhz or 85Mhz, SuperSPARC-II, with 2MB of cache each) on 16 system boards, with 8GB of total RAM, and could accept up to 64 Sbus cards for I/O. Total power consumption was typically around 17KW (208V 3-phase), with up to 16 load sharing bulk DC power supplies. It had limited hot swap and partitioning capabilities (which would be expanded upon in the follow-on Sun E10K). The massive blowers at the base of the cabinet cooled the machine and produced a ridiculous amount of airflow, and I always wondered if you could float on the cushion of air produced -- or at least have it levitate a beach ball. :-) It did run a modified Solaris and was built to be a database machine with massive I/O, not a traditional number cruncher like the "real" Crays.
In the early naughties I owned two of these, one with 19 x 85Mhz processors and one with 24 x 60Mhz processors. Paired with an I/O cabinet containing 5.25" SCSI hard disks and tape drives, the total weight for a single system was around 1,800 lbs. In 2003 I verrrry nearly arranged the purchase 12 more systems, to create "Crayhenge" -- the world's largest, slowest, and least power efficient cluster of SuperSPARC processors ever assembled. Shipping costs and "sanity" conspired to scupper the deal, though. What a glorious, mad thing that would have been... I still have around a thousand 32MB DIMMs from the project, a reminder of my reckless youth and the dotcom era when I had more money than brains. (Easy come, easy go!)
So yes, your watch or phone or tablet has more storage and compute power and runs on a battery, but my old Crays could stop artillery shells. Nothing compares to the atavistic thrill (or terror) of reaching for that 50A breaker for the first time! It's hard to respect a little plastic toy PC that can't tip over and crush you and doesn't require hearing protection. :-P
I always wondered how well a parallel make would run on one of these... pity we couldn't bodge together some sort of network connection to the basement of the Pittock.
Legend has it that it starts with HALLO DAVID and ends with SKYNET.
What is with the Quarantine labels?
maybe just some witty way an admin/system owner was saying keep your hands of these!
yeah... or it was used to try to find a cure for diseases when it wasn't calculating quotes!!
It's like when they switched off Commander data and then turn them back on on star track and he was kind a like hey why did you do that?
Their super computer for a salesman guy was like hey it's blown up sold him a brand-new unit upgraded them. All it really needed was a few minor tweaks New breaker.
You completely pulled that out of your ass.
Loved the Ronnie Kray reference
Never got to mess with any Cray stuff, but I did use a lot of Sun machines. The Sun machines look like Sun LX boxes running Solaris and Open Windows.
I swore I saw part of a Cylon at 3 mins
All these things have happened before..
One word. Heaven.
Gee wiz the lengths people go too just to get Mine sweeper running over 60FPS
we used these machines for calculating currency pairs for forex market..
The CS6400 was available with either 60 MHz SuperSPARC-I or 85 MHz SuperSPARC-II processors, maximum RAM capacity was 16 GB. up to 64 cpu.
No, that's the bus speed... you could run 64 85Mhz processors communicating on quad 55Mhz XDBuses. I have 3 single XDBus systems (SparcServer 1000/e) which run at 40 and 50mhz bus speeds, the CPUs can be 50 , 60 , 75 or 85 Mhz (40Mhz may work not sure).
I have a Sparc-10 with a pair of SM-60-2 CPU's. Got them on eBay 20 years ago. They have extra cache but it isn't accessible on the SS-10.
every nerds dream to have one of these with linux mint
What a Beauty!
And within ten minutes of booting up it had taking over organised
crime in the West end and was looking for celebs to take selfies with....
Beautiful ! Thanks for showing the hw and some of the sw, very interesting !
The predecessor of the E10K
"There are no prizes for guessing the name of the second machine". O'Sullivan? lol
Hello , just reaching out , had this pretty wild idea that is perfectly suited to the TH-cam Nation . I will keep it very short , very simple , there is a TH-camr that I have run across , even spoke to on the phone regarding his ideas and theory , the topic is one that is very , very HOT at all times in the meta verse , it is ancient , it is mysterious and it is absolutely TABOO to discuss while attempting to apply modern science . Simply His passion , this historic and ubiquitous subject matter is guarded by dogma . No , not dogma of the contemporary or the spiritual kind , simply dogma that is mandated via the minister of antiquities and tourism , a subject that , for the great folks that are identified by their historic studies to the letter are NOT allowed to at anytime apply modern science to this field of study . Granted , most recently an architect was allowed to have his theory run through a Dassault Aerospace supercomputer , however , this model and theory had since been renounced and declared essentially high treason for any of the intelligentsia within this arena to even discuss , much less foot note or cite. So here is my pitch , would it be possible , to use this restored CRAY supercomputer to run a scientific model of an earth based chemical reaction / an ancient physical plant if you will , would it be possible to use your “ancient “ supercomputer to run a program / model of an ancient physical plant ? Please , do not laugh this off , think about the MASSIVE TH-cam potential for a series on an “Ancient” SuperComputer , working to solve a truly “Ancient Mystery “.
you have good taste for music
the name of the song is "Out of Cray by Holle Mangler. His music is free to download. see the "More" tab below the screen area ;)
Damn son, 8.5 GB of RAM
The UK Met Office had two Crays called "Ronnie" and "Reggie"!
Looks like a decent machine. Any chance I could purchase three of them? I have a ton of gene sequencers and well, I'm putting together a park off the coat of costa rice and need a lot of power. They'll be running all my systems.
CHOMP!
8gb memory in the mid 90's? 😁
there is something about the Crays... I think you could say they were 1-bit, if I recall what Ive read correctly.
I wonder if the graphics were xwindows graphics? They reminded me of old Apple user interfaces though :)
It's OpenWindows. Sun's version of X Window System.
Yes, Xwindow with Sun's proprietary widget set (OpenWindows).
I'm guessing Nancy was the name of the second unit, right?
You wouldn't think you need so much cpu power to calculate insurance quotes. The cray has 64 processor at 66mhs and 16g of ram with a system bandwidth of less than 2Gb/sec, the machine costs about $400k USD, it's hard to believe that my I7 7700 system has more than 10 ten times the bandwidth and only cost about 1k USD
bjtaudio Its because they are computing aggregates on many dimensions (aka criteria) so when they gather your information they alreay have a risk assessment computed for every possible combination of criteria.
They essentially create a lookup that can be used on slower computers to create a quote fast.
Now days our phones piss all over this supercomputer
So would this one be more, or less, powerful then a Raspberry Pi ?
SPARC processor - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
50 MHz - MicroSPARC 1 (Tsunami) 1992, 225mm2 die, 5V, L1 cache 2 + 4kB, no L2 or L3 cache.
why cray6400 runing Sparc solaris?
e10k .......I remember the bootrom is storage in the SSP side.
Music should not be on videos like this.
Be silent.
What are your other rules, your highness?
_What are your other rules, your highness?_

You're confusing "should" with "must not, or I will destroy you!" Jerk.
First time I actually liked the music. Gave it a cool vibe.
Yeah I gotta agree the music used was perfect for this video, but the ambience is nice also.
It could have been funnier if they'd named them Doug and Dinsdale Piranha. Great vid. Thank you!
Seymour is there in spirit!
So really it's just a very big Sparc Server?
Rip electrical bill ?
James Carter:Could you remove the audio background music or remake the video without the background music I very much want to hear all the power up and boot up sounds the Cray Superserver 6400 emits
I agree. I’m getting to really hate background music. It is sooooo overdone and way too loud. 😖
slightlyevolved no there is annoying background music.
you sent me backin time when quality was spot on
Wonderful. I really enjoyed watching that. Thank you!
Will the days of REAL workstations come back Cray SGI & Sun?
E10k base on the cray,and then SunFire15K base on the E10K?
It's funny isn't it. This computer was an absolute legend. I was programming the zx81 when I heard about it (probably on the news) it was a machine you could only dream about having enough money to rent CPU time let alone owing it , seeing it, or touching It! And here we are, 30 years later and it's almost public domain.
Actually it was 40 years ago - Jesus I'm old lol
Cyberat Rodent I've no idea - but the whole "cray" super computer buzz sticks in the mind. It was a long time ago - I know that much !
You're probably thinking of the Cray 1, the first supercomputer of the Cray type, or maybe the XMP. This is a bit newer than the ZX81. IKWYM though, I used to dream about even seeing a Cray as a kid. Now I could probably get one off Ebay and use it to heat the house.
How many tubes does it have?
None. It is a 1990s machine, not *that* old.
LOL @ "Quarantine" warning tape marking two of the 1Us at 03:01. It's a pity the screens were not taken with long exposure settings, that flicker is bad, man.
Also: 8704 MiB RAM!
Ethernet Address 00:00:be:a6:40:63 - That Address has been assigned to "The NTI Group - NTI Group was established to serve primarily area employers, individuals and families looking for health insurance." I didn't know insurers get dedicated chunks of Ethernet address space...
Ronnie and Reggie...
If they put the panels on, the fans would slow down to more tolerable levels.
my heroes
0:01 Is this the sound a computer thinks about when it gets thrown down a flight of stairs?
using Solaris OS?
so thats about 0.6 teraflops by my guess right? my gtx 1080 is 9 teraflops my how technology advances
Wow that music is amazing. This should be on Spotify.
Holle mangler "out off cray" or you can get it here www.hollemangler.de
fuck they are so incredible beautiful and fun to see running common
Alright video but the background music as unnecessary.
LOVE THE MUSIC!!!
Did this originally belong to the met office? Ah, just saw the title but they had the same names. Normal Cray naming?
It originally belonged to Churchill Insurance (Bromley, Kent, UK)
We install this crap all day! Our people are High School graduates and they build units with multiple breakers every day!
".cool to hear ole techies talk the "techtalk
And I want one of those so fucking bad...
5:56 I thought it was Pete Waterman for a second.
the only thing that "booted" there was an old sun workstation ... runing solaris.. not a cray ..
You always look into a Cray computer through a workstation.
Were the Sun workstations the only choice of a terminal, or could you use something else?
The whole system was a SUN system, it uses the same architecture and CPUs as other sun's of the area. It basically was renamed and sold by sun as the Enterprise 10000, 15000 and up series. Yes you needed a sun workstation to control it as the graphical tools like hostview were sun/solaris binaries...
The music does not add to the viewing experience by the way.
i hope they'd put a SSD through the PCIe port..
Wow, 8 and a half gigs and 60 processor cores (and that's assuming each CPU is single core, which I know is not guaranteed for Sparcs) in the mid 1990s, and looks like HAL's smaller and more industrial brother... whoever was at the console of that must have felt like a minor god. Seemingly using IPv6 as well, though? I wonder when it received its last update, then? Maybe not too long before it got donated... All that just to calculate insurance premiums? Was it handling the company's entire workload through the one box?
...please tell me someone's ported Doom to it. They MUST have. Even though it doesn't have any graphics of its own, there was probably a text console version.
IPV6? Are you sure? I didn't see any ref to IP, are you confusing that with it's MAC address, which is much longer than a V4 IP address.
Hmm, good point, I'll have to rewind and double check. MACs had skipped my mind entirely for some reason. However I'm sure I remember seeing at least one address that had the IPv6 type notation of having two or more colons with no digits in between, signifying all zeros?
...yeah, derp. It's a MAC. The first two groups being written as single rather than double 0s threw me, as well as the use of colons instead of the more common dashes. Even though there's only 6 groups rather than the 8 of IPv6, and none of them are four hex digits long... Youtubing without my brain turned on, there ^_^
How did this compare to the A12X Bionic in the iPad Pro I am watching on?
very roughly speaking: It has up to 64 UltraSparc processors. the CPUs run at ~400MHz, which is comparable to about ~1.2 GHz of Pentium4 CPU speed,. A modern core2 i5 is about 4 times as efficient per core then the P4 core. Since an i5 runs at 3.6GHz instead of 1.2, that makes 64 / 4 / 3 = 5.3. So it's about the speed of a modern Intel core2 i5 CPU with 5.3 cores. Due to overhead and such though it will practically be as fast as a 4 core i5 CPU. So there you go ;) Not sure about the speed relative to an ipad A12X cpu but usually mobile CPUs are at least 3-4 times slower than desktop chips ;)
103 people do not know what a CRAY is. Awesome!
Three questions. What is the hardware comparable to today? What would have been its original purpose? What could it be used for now?
I believe it was said in the description or beginning of the video for what it was used for, as for today nothing bit nostalgia and for show really. a celeron is probably more powerful btw.
thanks for the response
Back in the day, we used the successor machine (the E10000) to run a very large telco's billing system and many other things besides. It had full logical partitioning (Sun's term was zones) which made buying them a lot more affordable if you wanted to carve out a dev, test, pre-prod and production environment and cluster the systems for availability.
Each CPU of the E10000 was slightly more powerful than the fastest Pentium processor of the day. I saw a benchmark of 19100 bogomips for a 24 processor E10000 back in 2001, or about 800 bogomips per processor. My 1996 dual 200 MHz HP PPro workstation got 200 bogomips per processor. Bogomips are meaningless, especially as I/O and memory bandwidth in an E10k is still fairly remarkable, as was 64 bit processors. I had a DEC PC164 motherboard back in 1999, and I was one of the first of all my friends to have a personal 64 bit system.
A typical E10k configuration of 32 or 64 processors would be thoroughly beaten by a modern 4 core / 8 thread i7 system in the last couple of generations, especially when coupled with PCIe m2 SSDs. And compared to a modern 24 core / 48 thread Xeon, there's no contest at all.
***** nice.
@@vanderaj My experience of Sparc was that it was 5 to 10 times faster than a Pentium with the same clock speed. These machines were 50 MHz, and there were 60 CPUs in this machine.
This supercomputer was a time machine it says quarantine
I did like the music in this video, fits good together with the content!