Top 500 trends

Dean Johnson dtj at uberh4x0r.org
Tue Nov 26 14:54:03 PST 2002


On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 13:12, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 10:14:32AM -0600, Dean Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Now if only Shuttle would introduce their liquid immersion box
> > and avoid the heatpipe altogether.... ;-)
> 
> http://www.spraycool.com; immersion is not necessary. This is how the
> new Cray X1 is cooled. In theory it could hit the mainstream in ~ 5
> years. It is the only technology I have seen capable of dealing with
> the power density of a small server built using Itaniums. So it
> doesn't attack the real issue (high watts/GFlop), but it papers
> over it nicely.
> 

Not nearly as nifty as the full immersion. I'm not talking useful or
effective, just cool looking. I have little doubt that put side-by-side,
a Cray-2 would attract curious onlookers nearly 100% of the time, versus
an X1.

> > I still like the characterization about whether you would want your
> > Oregon-bound wagon pulled by 8 sturdy oxen, or a thousand chickens.
> 
> google says someone claims the real quote is:
> 
> "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong
> oxen or 1024 chickens?" -- Seymour Cray
> 

A lot of his attributed quotes are apocryphal or misquoted. My version
actually was allegedly came from someone else while I was in the Cray
benchmarking group. However it could have been a modernized paraphrase
of a Seymour quote, owing to the fact that it was about the same time as
the Y-MP was coming out.

	-Dean




More information about the Beowulf mailing list