The original may be weak by today's standards, but it did an awesome job of improving many people's lives.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
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.
Self-taught tinkerer demos working room-sized Cold War-era supercomputer with vacuum tubes
The supercomputer race no longer means what it used to, as rankings lose relevance in the AI era
Jurassic Park packed $4 million of legit 1993 computer hardware
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
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
- How Open Science Can Help Researchers Prepare for the Next Pandemic
- Intel to phase out SGX after Xeon Diamond Rapids in favor of TDX
- US military-backed cargo pod promises 90-minute orbital delivery anywhere on Earth, 10-ton Ghost vehicle gets first real-world test
- Productive, Durable, Fungible: How NVIDIA AI Factories Maximize Return on Investment
- Ukrainian drones strike largest data center in Russia, multiple parts of 1.4 million square foot campus knocked offline
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.