[clug] ALPHA machines??

[Brett Worth]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2003, Simon Fowler wrote:

> Sadly, Alpha is dead, despite being technically the best processor
> available for most of the last ten years.

It certainly served Cray well.  In 1996 the T3E was released and was very
successful.  It had upto 2048 Alpha's and had models that lasted upto the
675Mhz EV5.6.  It filled a lot of the top slots in the top500 for a long
time.  Those that are still in service are now slipping well down the list.

The death of Alpha was announced a couple of months before the Compaq
buyout and was probably part of the negotiations given that Compaq were
deep in with Intel.

When the end of alpha was announced Cray were 6 months into developing
an Alpha on Linux cluster using the API CS20 nodes, Myrinet and Scyld
with a roadmap to implement some of the stronger T3E features like
checkpoint/restart.  It was shelved the day after the announcement.  Sad.

-- 
Brett