Yoh - Dale ! Looks Like Cray Computers now likes Intel Chips !!
Here's a little update on Seymour's latest !
"The new SRC-6, which will make its debut at a trade show in Dallas in early November, links up to 512 Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) Pentium chips with a shared memory and makes the whole thing configurable on the fly. "
biz.yahoo.com
Monday October 30, 2:21 pm Eastern Time
Forbes.com
Seymour Cray Speaks From The Grave
By David Einstein
Seymour Cray lives!
Not literally. Cray, the legendary supercomputer pioneer, died at age 71 in October 1996 following a car crash. But SRC Computers, the company he founded in Colorado Springs, Colo., just before his death, is about to unveil a computing system based on his final design.
The new SRC-6, which will make its debut at a trade show in Dallas in early November, links up to 512 Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) Pentium chips with a shared memory and makes the whole thing configurable on the fly.
The result, says SRC marketing vice president Michael Henesey, is a flexible computer ``that shatters convention and promises substantial performance gains for both technical and commercial applications, including Internet infrastructure.''
A prototype of the SRC-6 has been crunching numbers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee since spring 1999. The first commercial models, boasting 32 processors, are expected to ship next year and start at about $1 million. They'll be targeted at applications for bioinformatics, data mining and scientific and technical computing.
SRC officials claim that the combination of off-the-shelf hardware components with reconfigurable field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) will give its systems better price-performance than high-end computer servers sold by IBM (NYSE: IBM - news), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP - news).
SRC badly needs the SRC-6 to succeed. The company has been wrestling with Cray's final design since his death, testing the patience of a small group of private investors. Until recently, the company labored beneath a cloak of secrecy. It didn't issue any press releases until August 1999, when it announced the appointment of a permanent chief executive, Greg Fenner.
SRC was the fourth company started by Cray. He co-founded Control Data Corp. in 1957, then founded Cray Research in 1972 and Cray Computer in 1989. Cray designed the first supercomputer at CDC and gained fame at Cray Research, which marketed the first commercially successful supercomputers.
But Cray Computer's supercomputers struggled in a market that was starting to embrace parallel computing, which combined many--in some cases thousands--readily available PC processors to gain the same kind of supercomputing power found in Cray's stand-alone machines.
By 1995, Cray Computer was out of money and forced to file for bankruptcy. But Cray the man wasn't finished. The following summer he founded SRC with the aim of combining his own technology for memory and task management with Intel processors.
Did Cray have the right idea? The 49 employees at SRC certainly hope so. Their future-- and a possible IPO--depend on it.
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