The original may be weak by today's standards, but it did an awesome job of improving many people's lives.
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The original Cray-1 is considered to be the first commercially successful supercomputer, with 80 systems sold in its heyday. Science and engineering institutions sought it out to churn through gigantic datasets for uses ranging from intense weather prediction and aerodynamics to nuclear physics and structural analysis, among many others.
It was very efficient at these computations thanks to vector processing , a computing technique we take for granted nowadays. Vector computing made this supercomputer so powerful; while most computers still handled tasks one instruction at a time, the Cray-1 could process chunks of numbers in parallel, saving a huge amount of time.
The replica has 70 cores from the 30 Mac Minis, and of course, vector processing has since become the norm and a standard feature of modern CPUs; jumping from a single core to 70 “modern” cores and 50 years' worth of innovation is what Museo de Historia de la Computación wants to showcase in this project. It is not only a replica, but a representation of how far technology has come.
The original version was cooled by a network of refrigerant lines that led to 20-ton refrigeration compressors in a separate room, while the replica is cooled passively through a convection-tower design and is extremely quiet, with only the Ethernet switches making the most noise. The museum plans to use silent switches to make it even quieter.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/working-cray-1-supercomputer-replica-packs-30-vintage-mac-minis-and-1-5-tflops-passively-cooled-tribute-is-9-375x-faster-than-the-1976-supercomputer#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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