OK, 2016 wasn't the best, but look for a buyer? That's Cray A poor year for Cray was rescued by its fourth 2017 quarter’s results. Q4 2016 Q4 2015 Change Full 2016 Year Full 2015 Year Change Revenues $346,600,000 $267,500,000 29.6% $629,800,000 $724,700,000 13.1% $51,800,000 $20,300,000 155.2% $10,600,000 $27,500,000 61.5% Full 2016 year revenues went down 13 per …
...that this stock picture, take in the Met Office sometime in 2015, is focusing on the Sonexion storage subsystem of one of the smaller of the Cray systems there, and that the racks of the compute nodes are behind the photographer.
So what you have is a picture of a bunch of Dell servers and Xyratex (Segate) disk shelves linked together by only moderately interesting Infiniband, and running Lustre.
The more interesting compute part, including the Aries interconnect, is not visible.
The IBM 9125 F2C that can still be seen in the background of the picture was a much more interesting system IMHO, but I'm biased, because I used to support those systems!
Well, I suppose so, but it is some pretty impressive cables, both number and type, and the fact that there are no separate network switches for the Aries (they're integrated into the compute nodes themselves). Some of the cables are trunked into solid connectors for ease of maintenance. Not as well engineered or as 'pretty' as the IBM system IMHO, but...
For most large HPC systems, the interconnect is far more interesting than the compute capability. My point was that the Sonexion storage, although it has lots of lights, is architecturally probably the least interesting part of a Cray.
Also, after the photo was taken, there was custom artwork attached to the compute rack doors. I believe there is a time-lapse set of pictures on the Met Office web site that shows the artwork being attached to one of the clusters.
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