Cray Blitz

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bob
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Re: Cray Blitz

Post by bob »

Werewolf wrote:Hmm...ok. So how fast was a Cray computer back then? Could a Cray in 1995 compete with a Core i7 today, for instance?
No, but it wasn't _that_ far off. On a Cray T932, we ran about 7M nodes per second.

But the problem is, Cray Blitz was written for the cray, with about 20,000 lines of assembly language that replaced some of the time-critical Fortran code to improve the speed by a factor of 10. The T932 was a 1994-era machine. Cray Blitz Fortran source runs fine on today's hardware, but it uses a lot of array stuff that was very efficient on a vector box, but which causes a memory bottleneck on the PCs of today. In the 1995 time-frame, we could do 7M nps on the Cray, 100 nodes per second on the available PCs.