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Subject: Re: hardware of Cray Blitz

Author: Heiko Mikala

Date: 14:10:06 06/13/99

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On June 13, 1999 at 16:05:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On June 13, 1999 at 14:48:49, leonid wrote:
>
>>What was the hardware of Cray Blitz in 1983?
>
>A dual processor Cray-XMP with 1M words of memory (8 Mbytes).  We were
>searching about 20-30K nodes per second back then, when the micros were
>doing only a couple of hundred nodes per second...

Hi Bob!

This is a question which I thought about often during the last weeks: When you
say, that the Cray-XMP had 8 MB of memory and Cray Blitz searched about 20-30K
nodes per second, do you think that todays normal PC's are faster than the
super-computers of that time?

I was thinking much about this thing, because at work we have an "old" Vax and
an old HP mainframe, which are fascinating me - these machines did cost a *huge*
amount of money when they were bought only some years ago, but don't seem to be
faster than a normal Pentium (HP) or a medium-fast Pentium II (Vax).

Of course, these machines are built to work forever - they're still in full use,
24 hours a day, every day...


Another question, which I would like to ask you:

During the last 1-2 years you sometimes mentioned, that you tested some
positions on Cray Blitz and compared the results to Crafty. Do you still have
access to Cray Blitz? Is it still alive? And what happened to the other Cray
Blitz team-members?


Greetings from an "old" fan, who learned much from your articles about Cray
Blitz,

Heiko.



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