THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 6, 1996 TAG: 9606060001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PATRICK LACKEY
LENGTH: 61 lines
The Cray-2 supercomputer at NASA Langley's Research Center in Hampton has been retired after only eight years of service.
Like many people laid off or forced to retire of late, Cray-2 could still cut the mustard. In fact, as The Associated Press recently reported, Cray-2 could add up every Social Security number in the country in a quarter of a second, less time than it takes to scratch your nose.
Why anyone would want to add up all the Social Security numbers, or even two of them, is a mystery, but that's beside the point. The point is that Cray-2 was just as fast as its replacement, Cray-J916 (Cray-Jay, for short). Both Cray-2 and Cray-Jay can do a gigaflop of arithmetic calculations a second - in other words, a billion.
Where Cray-2 fell down on the job was its annual cost of operation - $700,000. Incredibly, that's $100,000 more than the price of a spanking new Cray-Jay, whose annual operating cost is only about $40,000.
If you had a perfectly good car that cost $2,000 a year to operate and you could buy a new car every bit as good and far cheaper to operate for $1,750, you'd buy a new car.
I love stories about computers growing ever cheaper. The stories have a magical, almost fairy-tale quality to them, because most items in our lives cost more and more, not less and less. Cray-2 cost $16.8 million new: 28 times more than its replacement.
Growing up in the '50s, I heard countless stories about things that would get cheaper - not one of which came true. Clothes were supposed to be made of paper some day. We'd wear an outfit once, then discard it, because it was too cheap to bother cleaning. We'd have personal helicopters, instead of cars, so there'd be no more traffic jams. Proponents of nuclear energy predicted that the unleashed power of the atom would make energy so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering. Judging from my three-digit utility bill, they're still metering.
My friends and I assumed in the '50s that most things would get more affordable and better. We assumed we'd live in nicer houses than our parents if we wanted to, because that was how progress worked and the '50s in America was a period of progress such as the world had never seen.
Instead, I watch computers get cheaper, while a huge chunk of my paycheck still goes for payments on a small house.
Life would be really good if houses got cheaper and we sold one after eight years because its annual maintenance cost was greater than the price of a just-built, low-maintenance home. If I could buy a new house for 1/28th the price of my present one, that would be progress.
What I love about items that do get cheaper and better - VCRs, TVs, calculators, etc. - is that the person in the neighborhood who makes a big show of buying everything first has to pay most, while people like me, who tend to buy last, get a far-better product for far less. A bad quality like sloth, pays off big.
Incidentally, to recall the olden days of computers, way back when the Cray-2 was new, in 1988, visit the Virginia Air and Space Museum in Hampton this fall. By then, NASA's Cray-2 should be exhibited there. The computer won't be plugged in, of course, because those ancient models cost too much to operate. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB