lights...
I want to walk into the computer room and see flashing lights...
Nowadays it looks like an art installation (not that that's a bad thing, but it is a computer room...!)
P.
Big data analytics people are constantly panning for nuggets of gold, and Cray has just the machine for them — its Urika-XA. Said to be a single-platform entity, consolidating a wide range of analytics workloads previously needing separate systems, its design has been optimised for compute- and memory-intensive and latency- …
I want to walk into the computer room and see flashing lights...
Well, quite. I am particularly partial to Thinking Machines' Connection Machine. IIRC we have Tamiko Thiel and Carl Feynman to thank for the CM-1 design. Later models were no less stunning.
Having said that, Cray-2's fluorinert waterfall is rather tasty too.
Nowadays it looks like an art installation (not that that's a bad thing, but it is a computer room...!)
And a bad one at that. Looks like something fresh out out of some arts or design school (were something decent is a rare occasion).
It's one of those things where I'd love to hear the rationale for the design. Someone made a conscious effort to turn a supercomputer into furniture, as seen here-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1#mediaviewer/File:Cray-1-UIUC_CAC.jpg
which spawned lables saying 'Please do not sit on the supercomputer'. Back then, we had upholstery, now we have differentiation by way of designer rack doors. Plus there are still latency advantages from the old-school toroidal designs vs generic 19" rack layouts.