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  1. Folks;

    Back for a second.

    Legion: I’ve never heard that supercomputers may approach conscious thought, but who knows?

    Denton;

    Today’s supercomputers are not your dad’s. They are mostly built from commodity processors, especially the Intel X86. The processors are “clustered” together by a switch which uses a protocol called “infinband” (Ethernet is not good enough – it has too much latency).

    If you’re looking to invest into this sector, I would asvise that you look at the two companies that make these Infiniband switches: Voltaire and Mellanox. They are Israeli companies, but they list on the NASDAQ too. These are the companies I visit in Israel. All the big players, IBM, HP, etc. OEM their switch.

    My role in all this is supplying super-high-bandwidth “Active optical cables” that connect the switches and the processors. One super-computer requires literally hundreds of thousands of these cables. Hellloooo sales!!!!

    An active optical cable is one that is terminated in copper, but has lasers embedded in it to boost the bandwidth. 150 Gb/s, baby!

  2. Yes, denton. I’m not sure what brief periods Cray shares actually did well. Probably for a while in the early 80s tech boom…along with SUNW and TNDM.

    However, even UNISYS has its day.

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