Cyber Retires
Although not an employee, the Cyber System, which has served the experimenters for more than a decade, was officially retired Tuesday, September 4, 1990.
This back-end number cruncher, used primarily by the high-energy physics community to analyze experimental data, was replaced by an Amdahl 5890-600E System, which features newer architecture and increased capacity.
"The Cyber System," said Gene Dentino (CD/Central Computing) "was viewed as the new and emerging technology at the time of installation and it served the Lab beyond its technical life." Around 1984, already cognizant of the need for increased computing capacity, an acquisition committee began researching the next generation.
The new system now in place was selected by the Next Acquisition Committee, who reviewed available technology, defined architecture, developed a request for proposal, went out for solicitation and conducted benchmark tests.
"Two major factors allowed us to make these system changes," said Jack Pfister (CD/Assoc. Head) who served on the committee. "One was the space provided by the new Feynman Computing center, and the other was a change in technology that allowed us to do our computing more effectively using a variety of vendors instead of just one."
Change did not happen rapidly. Since the CDC system had been in place at the Lab for so long, a large effort was required to migrate to other systems. This migration process, which was headed by Judith Nicholls (CD/Access), took more than a year to complete.
"One of the goals of the migration process was to protect the Lab's investment in software, computer generated engineering drawings and physics data," said Judith Nicholls. The other important consideration in the change-over, according to Joel Butler (CD/Assoc. Head), was to make all efforts to minimize any delay for graduate students finishing their research.
The Cyber era
According to Al Brenner in his article "Computing at Fermilab Since the Beginning" which appeared in the December 1984 issue of Fermilab Report, "Projections of the Laboratory needs had indicated that by 1978 there would be a need for substantially more computing capabilities at the Laboratory. Plans had already been laid as early as 1975 for an acquisition projected for 1978." In December of 1978, after a competitive acquisition, a CDC system was chosen based upon the current top-of-the-line processor, the CDC Cyber 175.
The system was delivered over a period of two years and began working in 1979. Increments which included additional memory, disks, tape drives, printers and communication gear were added on a continuous basis to satisfy the growing computing requirements of the Laboratory. However, it was becoming apparent that substantially more capacity would be required by the end of i983.
An additional increment was proposed for FY83 to at least double the computing power installed at the time and the dual processor Cyber 875 with three-quarters of a million words of memory was selected. The first of the two Cyber 875 processors was opened to the user community in 1984. In 1988, the Cyber 175s were decommissioned and in 1990 the end of an era was marked with the decommissioning of the Cyber 875.
Through the years...
For the computing trivia master, the following statistics were supplied by Steve Ahlgrim, systems manager for Cyber:
Cyber Stats (1979-1990)
Number of jobs: 4.4 million
Number of user tape mounts: 750,000
Number of different users: 3,200
Number of files archived: 839,626
Number of files in online system: 583,386
Total amount of data: 1.7 terabytes
