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...to Colorado Springs, I think I can throw a little light on the company.
Seymour Cray (as you may well know) split from Cray Research and started
this company. Its scheduled product release was more than a year late, a
couple of Govt contracts were cancelled. Seymour injected 26$ million of
his money into the company. They have one order for their machine from
the some Weather-related Govt institution in Boulder, CO. That's about it.
The last we heard in the local newspapers was the product will come out in
3-6 months' time-frame. They are desperate for orders.
In a time when Digital is talking about 1000 times AXP performance in a
couple of years, Jurassic Park graphics is done on Silicon Graphics machines,
Seymour has a weak case for people shelling out millions of dollars for
machines that aren't ready yet and will require all kinds of cooling
systems.......
I'll pass...
Nari
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| I believe Cray Computer and Cray Research are located in north-Central
Wisconsin. One of the towns mentioned is Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Mike Scheinoha
(formerly of MWO (Milwaukee), now of MAO (Macon, Georgia))
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Cray Research is the "original" Cray that Cray started. This, I think,
is headquartered in Minneapolis.
Seymour Cray split from this company (with some investment from Cray
Research) to start Cray Computer Corp, headquartered in Colorado Springs.
You may very well have branches in other places too!
Nari
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| Cray Computer was, in fact, spun off from Cray Research because
the BoD at Cray Research felt that Seymour was sucking down too much
capital in R&D and was headed off in the wrong direction.
Cray Research, last I heard, was in Mendotta Heights, MN - a suburb
of Minneapolis/St. Paul.
Cray Computer is working on Gallium Arsenide technology - a technology
that IMHO has yet to be proven as viable. I saw a presentation by
Seymour on what Cray Computer was doing and the technical obstacles to
be overcome are massive. GaaS technology aside, the processors are
multi-hundred pin beasts, where each "pin" is actually a 8-12 strand
gold braid that must be twisted into place. As we're talking about
"pins" of length measured in microns, humans can't do the bonding.
Last I heard, they were trying various robotic techniques to overcome
this problem.
The other thing is the issue of cooling. Supercomputers (if they can
still really be called that) require all sorts of exotic technology to
cool them down. It's not uncommon to see very strange looking
configurations (my favorite is the Cray machine that is "wired together"
with mercury and then frozen by virtue of being running inside of a
chamber filled with liquid nitrogen...my understanding is that when you
take the machine out of the bath, it literally "melts" as the mercury
warms up and is then simply pulled apart. There is a certain amount
of urban legend to that story though...). Supercomputers are cooled
by various complex means, however, and the cooling technology can be
nearly as expensive as the computers themselves.
Last I knew, Cray Computer was still trying to work out the bugs and
develop something shippable. And it's been that way for as long as
they've been operating.
I'm much more fond of the silicon-based critters that can sit on
my desktop and be cooled by a fan.
./chris
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