Anyway... On a lighter note, I wound up staying after the SDRIW meeting mentioned below and talking to a bunch of the guys there (you know, that whole "networking" thing). I happened to make an offhanded coment about CFEngine and Tom Perrine, the sort of leader fellow of SDRIW and the guy that organizes the meetings, overheard me. Then we got into a fairly lengthy disussion about taking care of lots and/or many different kinds of machines. He said that he had lots of different machines to take care of, including some supercomputers. Not surprising since we were on the first floor of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I figured they'd have one or two supercomputers laying about. This lead to the topic of Crays and I mentioned that one that sold on ebay a while back. I said something about how you'd need a whole house just for the Cray's cooling/power and why it would have been silly for a private individual to buy it. So then Tom said that "they" have a "real computer" for sale.
Well, "they" is the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The "real computer" is a Tera MTA which has recently been retired. Turns out that Tom is like the Director of Security of SDSC. Has asked if we'd like to take a tour of the data center and I predictably said "Yes, Tom, that would be very nice of you... if you have time then I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that a short tour would be lovely and well-recieved." Well, that's not true. What I really said was "Yes." What I was thinking was "Does the Pope shit in the woods?!? Fuckin-a we wanna see the data center!" I freely admit to being a whore for high-end hardware. Ever since War Games and WOPR I've wanted to see a Cray. And I figured they'd have some other funky stuff there to see too. They have all the cool toys.
Turns out the Tera is something of a weird machine, and not just weird looking, either. It apparently is the only one ever made. When Tera was first making it, they used to take the side panels around to all the trade shows. They had this frame that was empty, and they stuck the purple panels on the frame to show everyone what it was going to look like when people bought them and Tera started making them. I guess nobody bought any of them and Tera later bought Cray instead. So they made one unit, and used the panels that went on the roadtrips. It is a weird looking machine, though. I thought of Beetlejuice when I first saw it. Very stylish. It's also weird inside. The Tera had a strange multithreaded architecture, meaning that it did a lot simultaneously (in parallel). I guess it did quite well for what it was. The real trouble in getting rid of it is that it's gallium arsenide-based. Not something you can take to the landfill. And they can't sell it to another country, since it can be used for weapons research and is therefore classified as a munition (of course so is Perl so I'm not sure what really qualifies as a munition). They were still in the process of packing it all up and getting it decommisioned so I didn't find out who was buying it (if anyone). I was going to ask how many RC5 keys it can go through per second but thought it's be too geeky to ask. Must have had a weak moment...
Tom showed us another pretty supercomputer, the Cray T90. It's $25 million worth of pretty. It's got two parts: the main housing and the cooling unit. The main housing has all the CPUs and memory and I/O systems and whatnot. It opens up "like a Corvette", with the top reddish rounded part being hinged on one side. I wanted to see inside pretty badly, but that was impossible. Apparently, the air must be tested for impurities before you can crack the case. And the cooling system uses a perfluorocarbon fluid which is fine at cooler temperatures but gets really nasty when heated. So the EPA makes them sample the air before they open it as well.
The cooling unit was about six feet away and mostly whirred and gurgled a lot. I was leaning against it while Tom talked about everything the T90 did, what they used it for, etc. I remember thinking that I shouldn't be treating it as if it were a mailbox and that we weren't on the streetcorner talking about the Braves. It's pricey stuff, and while Tom didn't say anything about me being cavalier with his high-end stuff, I felt bad and made it a point not to touch anything I didn't have to while I was there. Anyway, the cooling unit had one really noticeable feature: a light-up waterfall on the front. You can kind of see it in this picture. The cooling unit is on the right, and the thing running down the center is the waterfall. I thought it was completely frivolous until it occurred to me that it's not at all useless: as long as you can see water churning around, you have a real good visual indicator that the cooling system is running. On a $25 million machine which would last for at most a minute without cooling, that's important. And it gives you something to show the guy the signed the check. You don't want buyer's remorse when supercomputers are cncerned.
The T90 is used for fluid dynamics calculations and such. It's a very fast computer. How fast? It can do 26.3 billion floating point operations per second (what's known as a 'gigaflop'). My Athlon can do almost one gigaflop, but the software to do so has to be specifically written to maximize my architecture's potential. Being 25 times faster than a $250 PC CPU may make the T90 seem not quite so supercomputer-ish until you realize that it was made in 1994. Back then a Pentium 60 was a big deal. 25 Athlons doesn't seem like a super computer, but 2500 Pentiums do.
But if the T90 isn't fast enough for you, then maybe IBM's Blue Horizon is. It does 1,700 gigaflops. That's 1.7 trillion floating point operations per second. It's also huge. It takes up a lot of space. And it needs some hefty machines just to boot up. I should have asked how many RC5 keys it could work through because during its burn-in it was used to crack some keys. It looks like the most it did was 224,293 blocks. The most I've ever done was 2,500 blocks of keys and that was when I had every machine at home and at the Eudora software lab going full-blast (I'd say like 40-odd Pentiums, a dozen Macs, a few odd Sun boxes, and one Alpha -- probably 60 machines total). So Blue Horizon really is super. At least until 2006 when my home machine will again do 1/25 as many gigaflops as it. Although I don't know what I'll ever do with 576 gigabytes of RAM and 5.1 terabytes of disk space. 640K ought to be enough for anybody, right?
Let's see, what else did they have there that was neato...
They had a Sun Enterprise 15000 (aka Sun Fire) with no serial number (no label either -- nothing). It was a demo model that stayed there. I'd never seen one in person, although Qualcomm had a couple E10000s. The E15K has a cute little LCD display complete with an animated bicycle to let you know that it's pedaling.
They have the world's largest tape library there too. It's a couple big round deals that save data on tapes and whatnot. There's a huge set of "regular" computers that act as its cache. It's pretty amazing. (One of the uses for all the storage is a project from one guy where he decided to put every combination of up to eight ASCII characters on it. Why? Because cracking a standard Unix password only means you have to make a hash of the unknown word and then look up the hash in the database of saved password hashes. Now that's a cool use for lots of storage...)
The last thing we saw was their "Vislab" or what's really called the Advanced Scientific Visualization Laboratory. It's one of those "visualize it in a CAD program and then print out the 3D object" type of deal. They have a smaller resin-based machine (laser shoots liquid resin, changing it to be solid) and a paper-based one (regular printer head etches out shape with special ink). Imagine a small donut shape (which is called a torus in case you really wanted to know) on your PC. Now you want to print it. Instead of printing every angle (kinda boring for a torus, but bear with me), say you could print it out as a full 3D object. Which is much better when you have to visualize something like proteins, cell walls, etc. So to print it, you have software that first prints the bottom-most layer on some medium (gel or paper). Then the table the media is on moves down imperceptibly. The next layer is printed/etched. The cycle repeats a couple thousand times per vertical inch until you have the complete 3D shape. Then a solvent of some sort (or even air) is used to wash away the "negative" bits, leaving only your completed sculpture. It essentially makes either plastic or wood models.
They had lots of demo pieces there in the window (they wouldn't let us inside the room with the machines). They had a map of the sea floor which was about 12"x18" and which I wanted to steal and hang on the wall. They had some baseball-sized asteroids (Eros being the most famous I guess). The coolest one was a 3D Earth, complete with color. I guess some guy figured out how to use regular inkjet ink and make colored objects. The colors wash out a little, but it's much nicer looking than plain grey. They also had some "ball in cage" type things (where a sphere is in a hollowed out cube) and a complete inside-out human skull. I thought of 3D fax machines when I saw it, a concept I'm sure is not novel to anyone who's seen the lab.
Well, that's about it for my field trip to UCSD and SDSC (the one encompasses the other). If anything else about my journey strikes me I'll add it in here.