Cray J90se upgrade to Community Computing

At the end of FY96, community computing resources consisted primarily of a Cray Y-MP8 (shavano) with 8 processors and 64 million words of central memory and a Cray J90 (paiute) with 16 processors and 256 million words of central memory. Each of these systems was capable of sustaining in excess of 1 GFLOPS and each delivered, on average, approximately 0.75 GFLOPS while running a typical NCAR Community workload.

However, the Y-MP8 (shavano) was installed in 1990 and was a relatively old machine (two generations old, as measured by advancements in computational technology). Due to its age, shavano had become less reliable and was much more costly to maintain than currently marketed systems.

To address growing concerns about the shavano's reliability, and to provide an incremental increase in the computational resources available to the community users, a Cray J90se (ouray) with 24 processors and 1 billion words of memory was acquired in January 1997 and put into general production in May 1997. The J90se is a newer version of the Silicon Graphics/Cray J90 series systems, with enhanced scalar processor and I/O technology. Ouray has proven to be a real workhorse, averaging in excess of 1.5 GFLOPS on the typical NCAR community workload. For more information on the J90se (ouray), see "Hip, hip, ouray!" in the Fall 1997 issue of the SCDzine.

Because ouray proved to be a stable, reliable platform for community computing, and in order to make floor space available for future additions to the computing resources for both the Community users and the CSL, shavano was decommissioned on June 30, 1997. SCD is currently working on obtaining additional computational resources to augment those available to Community users.

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