Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "A History of NASA's Supercomputers" video.

  1. SGI were the king of 3D, right into the 1990s. Their gear was also fantastically expensive. Re The Last Starfighter -- that was made in the days before the coming of RISC, when there was still this massive gap in power between “big” computers and “little” ones. The computer time on the Cray took a third of the production budget. Which I suppose was fitting, because the CG scenes took up a third of the running time of the final movie. Those scenes looked so good, they would still stand up to stuff being done 10 years later.
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  2. The X/MP was a derivative of the original Cray-1 architecture. Seymour Cray didn’t care that much for backward compatibility, so his Cray-2 would have required users to recompile all their code to take advantage of it. So Cray Research spun him off into a new subsidiary, Cray Computer, to work on the Cray-2 (and the later Cray-3 and Cray-4), while the parent company concentrated on producing new machines, like the X/MP and Y/MP, that kept backward compatibility, under the leadership of Steve Chen.
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  3. IBM boss Thomas Watson Jr was notoriously livid when CDC brought out their legendary 6600 machine, which at one leap became the world’s most powerful supercomputer. A memo he wrote said “I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, including the janitor”. And yet all the massed might of IBM’s thousands of engineers could not match that achievement.
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  4. The Cybers were from CDC, which was Seymour Cray’s former employer. That company was just set up to sell business-type machines to compete with IBM, but they made the “mistake” of hiring Cray, who designed a machine for them that was about 50 times faster than anything comparable from IBM.
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  5.  @nufosmatic  I seriously doubt that. Their “mission-critical software” was doing things like traffic analysis and code-cracking, for which they want all the computing power they can muster. So running on obsolete hardware isn’t going to cut it.
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  6. Can FEA benefit from SIMD architectures? Namely, calculations done on a GPU?
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  7. 1:57 Back in the 1920s, a “computer” was a person who did computation. So the idea of building a machine that could do the work of ten or a hundred or whatever human “computers” would naturally be called a “supercomputer”.
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