Retro-Computing Society of RI

It was about four years ago when I first learned that there was still a Cray in the Department of Physics at Brown University. The machine was in the same building as my office; for years I had no idea it was sitting idle just a few floors above me. My colleague Prof. Ian Dell’Antonio facilitated the donation to the Retro-Computing Society of RI. He uses the high energy theory cluster for research on observational cosmology and gravitational lensing.

My other computer is a Cray…

In my previous installment I described the Theory Computing Cluster machine room where the Cray J916 had been used for high energy theoretical physics research at Brown University. It was installed in 1996. I’m not sure exactly when they stopped using it. I was told that it was difficult to program and had been unused for some time. Supercomputers tend to have a rather short shelf life.

We first moved the Cray to Brown’s Science Center where it was on display for a few years. Before it could be safely moved I had to “split” the cabinets. There is one Peripheral Cabinet housing the I/O Subsystem and disk arrays. The second cabinet is the mainframe, or Processing Cabinet, which contains the CPUs and memory. The Cray documentation sometimes uses the archaic definition of mainframe to refer to the primary frame (or cabinet) that contains the central processor. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a usage from Honeywell in 1964 and gives this definition:

mainframe, n.

2. Computing. Originally: the central processing unit and primary memory of a computer. Now usually: any large or general-purpose computer, esp. one supporting numerous peripherals or subordinate computers.

The two cabinet are bolted together when it is installed. There are a number of data and control cables between the two cabinets that I carefully disconnected. Then I removed the AC power entry box in each cabinet to prevent the power cord from getting damaged during the move. A fully configured Peripheral Cabinet could weigh as much as 800 lbs and the Processing Cabinet up to 1,000 lbs. This machine is moderately configured and we estimate that the entire systems weighs more than half a ton. Machines like this were often, and accurately, referred to as big iron.

Moving day. Our facility has a loading dock and freight elevator.

The Cray arrived at our facility on June 23, 2014. We then began to read the fine manuals:

Preparing for a Cray J916 System Installation
Hardware Installation Procedures – Cray J916
Automated Confidence Testing – Cray J90 Series

There was also a form called the Installation Report which the customer was expected to fill out to evaluate the delivery and installation of the system and then send the form back to Cray for quality control. The top of the form has a line that is labeled: Customer Name (if not confidential)

Before we could reassemble the system our next task was to come up with a plan on how we were going to plug it in…

One of the two AC power entry boxes with an IEC 309 industrial plug. The blue color indicates that it is rated for 200-250 Volts. It requires a 30 Amp circuit breaker.

The use of high performance computers has had a tremendous impact on the progress of science. Theses machines have enabled us to advance our understanding of everything from elementary particles to the large scale structure of the universe. The fastest systems of any era are referred to as supercomputers. For many years supercomputing was synonymous with the machines designed by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation and later at Cray Research.

Supercomputers have always been very large and expensive. They require a large amount of electrical power and exotic cooling systems. They are typically a shared resource only used at large government research laboratories and academic institutions. By the late 1980s a new class of minisupercomputer was introduced. With a price starting at less than one million dollars these smaller air-cooled systems could exclusively be used by a research group or academic department.

In the mid 1990s the Brown University Department of Physics was the first physics department in the U.S. to acquire a Cray system. In Augusts 1995 a Cray EL98 was installed. This was followed in late 1996 with the installation of a Cray J916. They were used for high-energy and condensed matter theoretical physics. Details of the research are at the Computational High Energy Physics group page.

The Theory Cluster Machines webpage of the High Energy Physics Group at Brown University. The page was created in late 1995 and includes a publicity photo of the Cray EL98 that had just been installed. The snapshot was captured using NCSA X Mosaic on a SPARCstation 5 running Solaris.

These supercomputers were used by Professor Gerald Guralnik who played a crucial role in developing the theory that predicted the existence of the Higgs boson. In a presentation from 2002 titled “Computing to Learn Physics while watching computers grow up” he describes his long involvement in computational physics.

The Theory Computer Cluster machines included SGI graphics workstations which were used to visualize the data generated by the Cray supercomputers. The Sun SPARCstation 5 was the console used to start and manage the Cray J916.

These Cray supercomputers had not been used for many years and there are now more powerful computing resources available on campus. The Cray J916 was recently donated to the Retro-Computing Society of RI where we are working to restore the system to operational condition. I’ll be describing the restoration progress here over the next few weeks.

The Cray J916 powered up at RCS/RI with a glowing System Ready light on the front of the mainframe cabinet. Photo by Dave Fischer.

Historic computer preservation.