to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside. the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.
The flourinert tank has a ball valve, like a toilet cistern. we hung a plastic lobster in ours, because we called the cray "Yabbie" (Queensland freshwater crayfish)
That re-generator, the circuit breakers are .. touchy. the installation engineer nearly wet his trousers flipping on, the spark-bang was immense. Brown trouser moment.
The front end access was Unisys X11 Unix terminals. They were built like a brick shithouse (to use the australianism) but were a nice machine. I did the acceptance testing, it included running up X11 and compiling and running the largest Conways game of life design I could find on the net. Seemed to run well.
We got the machine as a tax-offset for a large Boeing purchase by Australian defence. End of life, one of the operators got the love-seat and turned it into a wardrobe in his bedroom.
Another, more boring cray got installed at department of primary industries (Qld government) to do crops and weather modelling. The post cray-1 stuff was .. more ordinary. Circular compute unit was a moment in time.
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance.
That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
> The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX ...
You'd need a different comparison to show how the Cray-1 was special. If the comparison is to single commodity CPUs, like the Pentium MMX, you could make much the same comparison for many mainframes and supercomputers. Several supercomputers in the 1980s exceeded 1 GFLOP, for example, and it wasn't until the 2000s that you could get commodity CPUs with that performance.
> The aesthetics of the machine have not been neglected. The CPU is attractively housed in a cylindrical cabinet. The chassis are arranged two per each of the twelve wedge-shaped columns. At the base are the twelve power supplies. The power supply cabinets, which extend outward from the base are vinyl padded to provide seating for computer personnel.
2. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent people from looking in.
3. To not have to look at something outside.
4. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent the chance of taking a picture of someone or something outside that could compromise the location of the computer or someone’s identity; sometimes the first place a photogenic computer was built was at a customer site.
I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray supercomputer, in a computer room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through, of course (all Crays required observations windows to show them off).
Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the back of the Cray, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up and saw the tour group, acted startled, then scurried away.
I was part of a group from the University of Minnesota that traveled to Chippewa Falls to tour the Cray plant. I expected to see exactly what you describe, the computer behind a big observation window. But instead they took us to a machine that was undergoing final testing before delivery, I think it was serial #5. They were extremely proud of their cooling and invited us to put our hands on the panels in the opening of the C to see how cool it was. I still freak out over thinking about what would have happened if someone had tripped and fallen into all those wires on the inside.
I remember doing a report on this in high school in the late 80s. I'd love to do an order of magnitude comparison to a modern M4 Mac... Amazing how far we've come.
I remember computer magazines of the time talking about "a Cray on a chip" in their April 1st jokes.
Well... we're there. Far past, in fact. We live in the future that then was so far out of reach that people could only joke about it, not consider it a realistic possibility.
Compare this to modern system: we could fully simulate this kind of slow computer in real time, I would guess, with all the wheels, clockwork and mechanics as well as logic circuits with full electricity. Deciding the simulation level would be a bit challenging - is this an atomic, an electron or more common sense simulation -; still I think the simulation would work as well as this kind of document.
Absolutely not on the electrical level. ISA emulation, probably, maybe, though these Crays are not IEEE machines so you have to actually fully emulate the floating point operations, instead of punting them to the FPU. That may make getting hundreds of MFLOPs on difficult.
If these kinds of machines interest you I highly recommend the book "The Supermen" by Charles Murray. It has all the details you would ever want on Seymour Cray and others in the business.
I was working at a geophysical company in the 80's and we lusted after a Cray-1. Best we could afford where array processors (CSPI) connected to VAX systems.
In college I had an account on our ACM chapter's DEC Alpha, which I used primarily for mudding. Its DNS name was cray-ymp.xxx.xxx.edu, which resulted in more than a few moments of shock/consternation from mods. "You're mudding from a CRAY Y-MP???"
Before IBM's deep blue, apparently there was a chess program called Cray Blitz, I'm sure the cray had the raw power(20MHz? But with 64 parallel operations) needed to beat the top humans, but the software just wasn't there yet.
Blitz was ported to C and continued development FOSS as Crafty, mainly by a U of Alabama professor, but to this day it can't beat top humans on modern cpu (topping at 2650 elo instead of 2850 of, say, carlsen.)
The latest version of Crafty has a significantly higher rating on CCRL than Fritz 10, the version that defeated Kramnik in 2006. He was the World Champion and was rated 2750 at the time. I do not know what source you used for Crafty’s rating but ratings from different lists are not comparable. It is highly probable that Crafty running on a Ryzen could defeat any human.
I am also of the opinion that with an optimised program the CRAY-1 would have been on par with Karpov and Fischer. I also think that Stockfish or some other strong program running on an original Pentium could be on par with Carlsen. I am not sure if Crafty’s licence would count as FOSS.
I was a heavy user of the Cray-1, Cray-XMP and Cray-2 at the magnetic fusion computing center at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. One of the important things to remember was that the Crays of this generation were vector processors, that is they carried out operations across multiple elements of arrays at once. If you didn't structure your code properly, you didn't see these extraordinarily high instruction rates.
And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)
According to this link https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cray-1-supercompu... these things retailed for $8 million (in 1975 dollars!). That's almost $50,000,000 today - I can't even imagine how much work went into justifying a purchase like that.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadThe flourinert tank has a ball valve, like a toilet cistern. we hung a plastic lobster in ours, because we called the cray "Yabbie" (Queensland freshwater crayfish)
That re-generator, the circuit breakers are .. touchy. the installation engineer nearly wet his trousers flipping on, the spark-bang was immense. Brown trouser moment.
The front end access was Unisys X11 Unix terminals. They were built like a brick shithouse (to use the australianism) but were a nice machine. I did the acceptance testing, it included running up X11 and compiling and running the largest Conways game of life design I could find on the net. Seemed to run well.
We got the machine as a tax-offset for a large Boeing purchase by Australian defence. End of life, one of the operators got the love-seat and turned it into a wardrobe in his bedroom.
Another, more boring cray got installed at department of primary industries (Qld government) to do crops and weather modelling. The post cray-1 stuff was .. more ordinary. Circular compute unit was a moment in time.
(I think I've posted most of this to HN before)
That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
You'd need a different comparison to show how the Cray-1 was special. If the comparison is to single commodity CPUs, like the Pentium MMX, you could make much the same comparison for many mainframes and supercomputers. Several supercomputers in the 1980s exceeded 1 GFLOP, for example, and it wasn't until the 2000s that you could get commodity CPUs with that performance.
The Transputer's inter-chip channel connections remind a bit of Nvidia's NVLink or AMD's Infinity Fabric.
Thoughts:
1. To block some sunlight from getting in.
2. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent people from looking in.
3. To not have to look at something outside.
4. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent the chance of taking a picture of someone or something outside that could compromise the location of the computer or someone’s identity; sometimes the first place a photogenic computer was built was at a customer site.
Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the back of the Cray, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up and saw the tour group, acted startled, then scurried away.
Well... we're there. Far past, in fact. We live in the future that then was so far out of reach that people could only joke about it, not consider it a realistic possibility.
In one lifetime.
i don't think there is a comparable book about the cray-1?
I know a couple of museums have them, but I don't think any software has ever surfaced, am I right?
(emphasis mine)
I was working at a geophysical company in the 80's and we lusted after a Cray-1. Best we could afford where array processors (CSPI) connected to VAX systems.
Blitz was ported to C and continued development FOSS as Crafty, mainly by a U of Alabama professor, but to this day it can't beat top humans on modern cpu (topping at 2650 elo instead of 2850 of, say, carlsen.)
I am also of the opinion that with an optimised program the CRAY-1 would have been on par with Karpov and Fischer. I also think that Stockfish or some other strong program running on an original Pentium could be on par with Carlsen. I am not sure if Crafty’s licence would count as FOSS.
Did I miss it?
And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)