Cray-Cyber Timeline

January – June 2010

• Restart of several machines which were already running in our old data center: Cray J916, Cray YMP-EL, SGI O2000, Sun E10k, CDC 4680

December 2009

• Cabling and initial startup of a two rack air cooled Cray T3E configuration

September 2009

• The big move: Shutting down the data center at Stäblistraße and moving everything to our new exhibition hall on the campus of the University of German Armed Forces in Neubiberg, close to Munich (pictures).

June 2009

• Acquisition of a HP2116B including a drum store unit.

January 2009

• Unmounting remaining parts of Control Data Cyber 2000 at Fides, Zurich. Moved everything to our storage facility in Munich (pictures)

December 2008

• Unmounting parts of a Control Data Cyber 2000 at Fides, Zurich, Switzerland. Moved all spare parts to a storage facility in Munich (pictures)
• Acquisition of HP Superdome, SunFire E3800, IBM H70, donated by University of Mainz, Germany.

October 2008

• Acquisition of a SGI Onyx, consisting of two 19" racks, donated by Faurecia, Karlsruhe, Germany

September 2008

• Aquisition of a SGI Origin 2000. 2<-node configuration (1 rack), donated by Max Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik (MPP), Garching, Germany

August 2008

• Acquisition of two Sun ft1800 fault tolerant systems, donated by O2, Munich.

June 2008

• Acquisition of an IBM 705 tube based machine, donated by Höchst, Frankfurt/Main

January 2008

• Acquisition of a Cyber 932, donated by Fides, Lugano, Switzerland

May 2007

• Visit of two courses from nearby elementary school (pictures)

October 2006

• Exhibition at German trade fair Systems 2006 in Munich under the hood of computermuseum muenchen.

August 2006

• Wissenschaftssommer 2006: weekend exhibition at Marienplatz, downtown Munich

July 2006

• Acquisition of Fujitsu VPP 300
• One month exhibition at Kaufingertor Passage (Pictures)

March 2006

• Started meetings concerning a computer museum in Munich.
  Many meetings and mails will follow.

December 2005

• Acquisition of 3 SUN Enterprise 10000 systems
• Acquisition of Cray T3E system

November 2005

• Annual Tours Day -- big success, estimated 200 to 250 visitors

October 2005

• Installation of a SGI Origin 2000
• Fiddling around with mirrored system disks in J916

September 2005

• Attack on www.cray-cyber.org, in consequence we put down guest access

August 2005

• Water cooling at the Cyber 860 works!
• Started recabling the NEC SX-5.

July 2005

• Started restoring the water cooling subsystem of our Cyber 860.
• Started thinking about professional fund raising.

June 2005

• Solved networking hardware troubles at J932.

May 2005

• Annual Vintage Computing Festival Europe in Munich.
• Disk crash at the Cray J916 just before going public. No backup yet. Reinstallation will be with mirrored boot devices.

April 2005

• Acquisition of several SGI Origin 2000 from Deutscher Wetterdienst (german meteorological service), Offenbach.
• Acquisition of a tape robot and a MO jukebox from the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (austrian meteorological service), Vienna.
• Acquisition of a NEC SX-5 from the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik (IPP), Garching.
• Started archving tapes to disk images.

January 2005 up to March 2005

• Defragmenting, defragmenting, defragmenting... lots of boxes, pallets, transports. Boring but neccesary.

December 2004

• Power supply of the NEC SX-4 died.
• A Cyber 830 arrived.

November 2004

• Annual tours day in our server room. This year accompanied by a journalist from the german Linux Magazin.

October 2004

• Opportunity to exhibit some logic modules etc. at the german trade fair Systems in Munich.
• A Cray T3D and a Cray C94 arrived!
• Implemented a RSS feed for our diary.

September 2004

• Lots of defragmentation at both sites: server rooms and storage facilities.

August 2004

• Ongoing work with installation of a Cray J916 (J90, 16 CPUs).
• Started restauration of a Cray J932 (J90, 32 CPUs).

July 2004

• Acquired two HIPPI switches, not sure if, when and how those get installed.
• Troubles with our central server: kernel upgrades won't always work as designed.
• Troubles with acquisitions: due to US export restrictions it's not this easy to get real big iron over to Europe. We startet becoming experts in US export law.

June 2004

• Several transfers to our storage site, defragmentation of storage space: we're awaiting very interesting, big, big iron.
• Defragmentation of our raised floors and user area. That's another reason, why the NEC SX-4B still isn't online.

May 2004

• Vintage Computer Festival Europe 5.0. Big success, lots of visitors.
• Improvements on the air conditioning: air hoses arrived and were mounted outside.

April 2004

• Installed UPS for server and yel.
• Acquired another Cray J916 which will provide us with spare parts.
• Continued restauration work on the water cooling circuits of the Cyber 860.

March 2004

• NOS/VE on the Cyber960 now has user management. Finding the right manual at the right time usually helps a lot :-)
• Ongoing work on the card puncher: hard wired test routines are working.
• Freddy created an online system log book.
• Partially reconfiguration of our power distribution happend: We've got an online UPS which is used to improve the 7x24 uptime of the Cray YMP-EL.

February 2004

• Dual state installation of NOS 803 and NOS/VE 1.6.1 on the Cyber 960. So far, there is no user management and no network on the NOS/VE side.
• Cray-Cyber.org has airplay on a bavarian radio station in their saturday afternoon radio show.
• Started restauration on the Cray J916.
• Visitors from the HLRS brought one of their NEC techs with them. He managed to repair our HIPPI problems at the NEC SX-4B.

January 2004

• Acquisition of two Cray J90 super computers, one donated from Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, the other one bought from Deutscher Wetterdienst.
• Startet revive of the CDC card punch. First thing is to renew cables from card punch controller to card punch.

December 2003

• Repair of the card reader: a tranistor on one of the interface cards was broken. This was the first electrical problem, so far all repairs on the Cyber 960 and peripherals were mechanical ones.

November 2003

• The Control Data 4680 runs with dual CPU and dual FPU now.
• The CDC 405 high speed card reader is up and running.
• Our second tours day 2003 is a great success. 300 visitors on one day! Thank you and see you again in November 2004.
• During presentation, the card reader refuses to work. What a pity!

October 2003

• Two Hewlett-Packard K200 arrive.
• Finetuning of card transport at the CDC 405 punched card reader. Finally, the reader works now.

September 2003

• Finally, the air condition is up and running. The temperature is stable at 28 deg. celsius.
• Together with the air con there were several changes in the infrastructure (add-on fans, some brick walls, etc.)

August 2003

• We're sponsored by KAMP, which means we've got a DSL line with fixed IP for no money. Thank you Kamp.
• NEC SX-4B gets installed.
• Still no air con, still a very hot and dry summer. The max temperature in the server room is around 55 deg. celsius (131 fahrenheit).
• The Control Data 4680 is online!
• NOS/VE installation on the Cyber 960 in dual state mode.
• Bavaria Kälte- und Klimatechnik GmbH starts work on the air condition.

July 2003

• Started work on the Cyber 860. First things will be electrical connections, cooling circuits and mechanical restauration.
• The EMC Symmetrix 3430-18 arrives. The disk array is equipped with 18GB SCSI disks and provides 1.3 TB capacity in total.
• Still heavy heat problems, still no air condition running.
• Finally, we have a logo. We also relaunched the web site in a slightly new design and improved functionality.

June 2003

• Started work on the NEC SX-4B
• The Control Data 4680 should be online for quite a while now. But there are still problems with SCSI-Controllers, CPUs and compilation of GNU software.
• John built a second interface to connect another IDE disks to the Cyber 960. This disk is planned for NOS/VE.
• For the first time this year, we ran into heat problems. The air condition will be weeks away. At least, we managed to get the condenser up and running.
• Installed several ancient worksations in user area.

April 2003

The NEC SX-4B arrives. Because we are busy with some other work (preparation for VCFe 4.0, CDC 4680, card reader etc.) there is no time to immediately switch on the NEC. The machine has to wait for a couple of weeks...

March 2003

Finally, the renovation work is completely done. As usual, there are all the small items at the end, which take most of the time.
During renovation, we had most of the time a running Cyber 960 on Saturdays and a running Cray YMP-EL 24x7. There were some short downtimes, usually just for moves or changes in the power cabling. Overall we are proud of the nice result. White walls, a white ceiling, cleaned up lightning, a new floor, a nice hand crafted ramp to the new raised floor etc.

With the renovation, Wolfgang Stief joined the team and replaces Stefani, who quit some weeks before due to other priorities.

February 2003

The Great Renovation starts. With the graceful help of many people it was lot of work but also lot of fun. Now we have raised floor in both rooms, the Cybers are together in one room, the Unix machines are together in the other room. We have a user area, some new power cabling, on the first sight lots of space and a heating problem. Latter will pop up in summer, we did not yet know about this.

January 2003

The Cyber 960 gets a new NOS version. Now, users can connect using TCP/IP, there is no more need for the serial lines.

November 2002

Plannings start to reorganize the computer room. There has to be one more room with raised floor, both Cybers should go into one room, there should be a user area with ancient workstations, the walls as well as the ceiling desperately need some new painting. The Great Renovation is scheduled for February 2003.

On November, 26th, 2003, there is our first Tours Day. We had around 40 visitors.

End of November 2003, the Cray YMP-EL went online. First, there were only guest accounts, in the meantime we also offer personal logins with synchronized passwords on all systems. The little Cray runs 24x7 (doesn't need this much energy and has fragile disks).

Thanks to Dietl Feinmechanik (Gauting) we could repair our CDC 580 chain printer: Dietl manufactured a new gear-wheel to replace a broken one at low cost.

October 2002

In USA, the Vintage Computing Festival takes place. Cray-Cyber.org takes part remotely with its Cyber 960. The Cyber is running 48h for this event.

September 2002

In September 2002, the Gesellschaft für historische Rechenanlagen e. V. (GHFR) was founded. The association has it's main focus on restoring and running ancient computer systems and preserve related knowledge in forms of documentation, hardware and software. Cray-Cyber.org is one subproject of GFHR.

August 2002

The Cyber 960 goes online for public access the first time. Because there wasn't a TCP/IP-Stack for the Cyber in the beginning, this was done by 16 serial lines. Meanwhile, the Cyber talks of course IP.

Also in August we started reviving some Unix based CDC machines.

July 2002

June 2002

Software and documentation for the Cray YMP-EL arrives from University of Erlangen.

April 2002

"A small Cray needs an administrator." That's how Cray-Cyber.org began: During VCFe 3.0, John Zabolitzky looked for an admin for the Cray YMP-EL. Freddy Meerwaldt, Alexander Mann and Stefani Seibold wanted to join John, administering the Cray. In the beginning, there were monthly meetings on initial planning and cabling.