Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "A History of NASA's Supercomputers" video.

I did Aerospace ay U. Illinois (graduated at the end of 87). I never did anything on the CRAYs, but we were being shown what some of the postgrads were doing with CFD modelling. I was into FEA with my professor and we just used one the departments Cybers for that. I was on the swim team and there was a post grad who'd been on the team a few years earlier who the coach still let use our locker room. I forget his name, but was working on the parallel processing compilers for the CRAYs. I remember being quite surprised to find out they were still using Fortran and he explained they did that because the math algorithms had already been proven. What he was working on was how to send different parts of the code to different processors and get the best performance. I graduated at the end of 87 and they were just bringing on the second CRAY which I think might have been a 2 or an XMP-48. I'm actually Australian and its incredibly hard to explain to people here what it was like to be at Illinois in that era. I had done a year at RMIT in Melbourne before going to Illinois. RMIT had all of 1 Cyber mainframe for the entire university. Just the Aerospace department at Illinois had 2 Cybers as well as access to the other engineering VAX main frames. One of my professors had 2 Micro Vax units under a desk in his office. A few years after getting back to Oz our main Science and Research Organisation the CSIRO got a YMP single core and thought it was the greatest thing ever. It was around the time Illinois was commissioning its second XMP-64.
1
@marcusdamberger Dude what an awesome story. I do remember Plato, but I hated it. Maybe in 85-86 it was still at that point where it was so cumbersome that it gave us all nightmares. Looking back I am certain that we were just lab rats for that kind of system. What Plato sort of achieved that's really important is what it inspired. The engineering school had been given a bunch of systems. Dozens of IBM compatibles, AT&T Unix PCs (i had one and it was ahhh-ful!) and 2 rooms full of first gen Apple Macs that had a mouse AND THEY were so awesome for term papers. It was a big deal back then having access to fonts and basic spell checking. I like to think that Plato's inspiration was to get the guys at the NSCA make it as easy to use as an Apple Mac AND VOI-ah-LA they gave us the web browser. Think about it why would a bunch of guys playing with CRAYs turn their attention to Plato and make it work like an Apple Mac? Yet they did and arguably made one of the greatest technical achievements of the computer age. It only had 1 downside - it made computers so much easier to use that millions of people suddenly thought they were tech savvy. 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂
1