THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 3, 1996 TAG: 9606030079
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HAMPTON LENGTH: 52 lines
A computer that can scan the equivalent of 10 encyclopedias in one second or add up every Social Security number in the country in a quarter of a second has been deemed obsolete by NASA.
After eight years of service, the Cray-2 supercomputer was moved last week from NASA Langley's Research Center to the Virginia Air and Space Museum in Hampton.
Joe Drozdowski, manager of high-performance computing at Langley, acknowledged that the machine can still do some astounding calculations. It's just that the newer supercomputers can do the same work at less cost.
NASA paid $16.8 million for the Cray-2 in 1988. The machine, nicknamed Voyager by NASA, was easier to use and 10 times faster than the supercomputer it replaced, Drozdowski said.
But it also cost $700,000 a year to operate, including the salary of an engineer to maintain it. It regularly needed new equipment and was cooled with a chemical, fluornor, that cost $300 a gallon. The machine contained 200 gallons of fluornor and lost about 10 gallons a year to evaporation, Drozdowski said.
NASA could buy a new supercomputer, a Cray-J916, for $600,000.
``Basically, if somebody offers you something new for less than your maintenance bill on the old one, you say, `It doesn't make sense to do this anymore,' '' Drozdowski said.
Factor in that the new Cray is cooled with air, not fluornor, and that its annual maintenance bill will be about $40,000, and there was little left to consider.
In terms of performance, the new Cray is not a vast departure from the old one, Drozdowski said. The new Cray has twice the memory (16.2 billion bits), but works at roughly the same speed (1 billion arithmetic operations per second, or one ``gigaflop'').
The computers were built by Cray Research of Eagan, Minn. The company's first supercomputer, the Cray-1, was introduced in 1976, said company spokeswoman Mardi Larson. The Cray-2 came out in 1982 and has been followed by six new generations.
Supercomputers have become better, smaller and less expensive all at the same time. The new Cray - considered the entry-level model of the company's line - is roughly the size of a refrigerator, about one-eighth the size of the old one.
The Cray-2 will be on permanent display at the museum as part of an exhibit that will be finished by fall, said spokeswoman Kim Henson. The computer will not be operational at the museum for the same reason NASA has replaced it: cost. It would cost about $1.5 million to install the support equipment needed to get the machine running at the museum, Drozdowski said. by CNB