visit to Fujitsu

[maxsleg]

I have been in Tokyo this week on business and I was with Fujitsu this morning. In the lobby of the corporate building they had a very nice display of the Prime FX10 Supercomputer. The cooling is immense, very impressive. Will upload some pictures. Also great view of Mt. Fuji from top floor..

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/ ... /primehpc/

[ClassicHasClass]

It's good to see *someone*'s committed to SPARC (Snoracle certainly isn't).

[commodorejohn]

Any last outposts of alternative architectures in this era of creeping x86/ARM duoculture are worthy of my respect.

[ClassicHasClass]

I like SPARC, though the register windows rapidly proved the wrong way to go (everybody else went the other way). If there's going to be an alternative, it's going to either be MIPS or POWER, because they're really all that's left except for small cores like Blackfin.

That said, I just pulled the trigger on a 3G Samsung ARM Chromebook. Better than buying Intel.

[maxsleg]

FX10 Supercomputer in Fujitsu corporate lobby

A photo

amazing plumbing

[maxsleg]

view from 20th floor

[ShadeOfBlue]

This looks really cool

Do you have any pictures of the boards inside?

[maxsleg]

no, I did look but this was all that was on public display.

[jpstewart]

amazing plumbing

Isn't it always a sign of a "serious computer" when installing it requires a plumber?

It must have been awesome to see in person. Thanks for posting the pic!

[commodorejohn]

Any last outposts of alternative architectures in this era of creeping x86/ARM duoculture are worthy of my respect.

You're the guy running NT on Alpha, aren't you?

Then no.

And running VMS on VAX...and RT-11 on PDP-11...and Kickstart/Workbench 3.1 on Amiga...there's room for variety, is what I'm saying.

How many people actually have any interaction with the hardware? UNIX boxes are 99% C and the rest is assembly wrapped in C. Most UNIX and Windows programmers are completely isolated from the box they're coding on. The API is the machine. Does it really matter what the architecture is as long as it performs as you want?

The API is not the machine, because you take the machine away and the API is just a collection of theory. Hardware will always matter because without it software is irrelevant. (Besides which, even in the RISC world architectures differ significantly in performance characteristics for different applications.) The idea that we've reached (or will reach) some kind of transcendent state wherein software runs in an ethereal realm of Pure Computation where the concerns of the physical processor world cannot touch it is futurist silliness.

[hamei]

The idea that we've reached (or will reach) some kind of transcendent state wherein software runs in an ethereal realm of Pure Computation where the concerns of the physical processor world cannot touch it is futurist silliness.

Nothing new here ... in our entire world, reality has no influence on the wackoffmeisters in control.

[commodorejohn]

Don't get me started, man.

[hamei]

Don't get me started, man.

To head back towards the subject ...

Speaking of futurist fantasy wackoffmeisters, it's kind of funny. Since about 1980 they have all been castigating Japan for a "lack of growth ! stagnation ! what will they do when the older generation retires ?" and other conventional-wisdom bullshit.

Meanwhile, the oracles in the west put all their eggs into the finance basket.

Japan is now doing fine, about the same as they have for the past two thousand years, while the US is bankrupt and inflating its money to weimar heights in order to pretend that their retarded ponzi scheme was a viable way to live.

Japan and probably Fujitsu will still be around in another hundred years.

[commodorejohn]

Nothing is dead and gone until the last devotee dies and all of the books are burned, man. Unless that happens, it's all just wax and wane. Right now, sure, there aren't many people paying attention to anything at the lower level. But there's still call for assembler optimization in performance programming, console developers still get their hands dirty exploiting a fixed set of hardware, and the development of GPUs into massively-multicore stream processors is opening up a whole new avenue for wild and wonderful experimentation. And eventually, when Moore's Law hits the wall imposed by that pesky physics and multicore computing reaches its peak efficiency, you're gonna see a return to the days of widespread low-level optimization, as the world tries to shake its addiction to an ever-increasing horsepower level that it simply can't have anymore...take heart, my friend.

[foetz]

i guess most in here are fans of variety; and for many good reasons. but details there would go too far off-topic.
however to bridge both issues the japanese did fortunately not go with the flow so much compared to most other regions and countries. the next nec sx is still scheduled, fujitsu keep running sparc, hitatchi who got quite a number of custom stuff and not to forget sgi japan who always were a bit different.
the fact alone that fujitsu have a big iron sparc in their lobby is a good sign that not everybody and everything get assimilated by ipad/intel/twitter morals. resistance is not futile

btw i got a 73gb fujitsu disk in my server-octane and it's great