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Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1
- jyothi 16y agohttp://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ The detail article with architecture & photos from the building process.
- alain94040 16y agoNice. It's an FPGA board, the Verilog source code for the processor is available. 80 MHz, plenty of vector registers, fits inside one modern FPGA... Downside: the author couldn't locate any software for Cray yet. Looks like he looked pretty hard and still came up empty. Anyone can help?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jballanc 16y agoTry contacting the Computer History Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org/ http://www.computerhistory.org/). They have a fairly large collection of Crays.
- mncaudill 16y agoThe creator already tried this route, as detailed in the the original post that NYC Resistor linked to.
- jballanc 16y agoHmm...didn't follow the links far enough. I find it hard to believe that they don't even have contacts who would know where to find the original source (most likely for a price, but still...). EDIT: Nevermind... I see: They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90’s Well, that's rather...sad
- js4all 16y agoMaybe a museum outside the U.S, can help. There is one in my old hometown in Germany. It is the biggest computer museum in the world and they have a cray-1. http://en.hnf.de http://en.hnf.de
- jacquesm 16y ago> 80 MHz It runs a bit slower, he's got it pegged at 33 MHz in the article linked elsewhere, the 80 Mhz was the original machine. Absolutely awesome project, even if not very useful, the guy must have pretty amazing skills to re-implement all this 'on the side'.
- _delirium 16y agoI suppose I'd probably read it somewhere, but it reminds me what a huge gap there used to be between supercomputers and anything else in raw horsepower. 80 MHz in 1976! Workstation-class machines only achieved those clock speeds around 1991-92, and the Pentium hit that speed in 1994. Not directly comparable (very different architectures), but still I think a bigger gap than currently exists between top-end consumer equipment and top-end big iron when you look at single CPUs (big iron of course scales up to much higher multiprocessing).
- jacquesm 16y agoWhat's also very impressive is not just the raw clock speed but the architecture is also deeply pipelined, something that comes in very handy in a vector processor.
- jedbrown 16y agoIt hasn't been fair to compare single-CPU performance in a long time, machines on the top500 either use commodity x86-64 chips, or (BlueGene) much slower chips with good memory and power efficiency (NEC is a notable exception). But it's worth noting that supercomputer performance consistently outpaces Moore's Law (http://59A2.org/na-slides/Keyes-PetaflopsSeriously-2008.pdf http://59A2.org/na-slides/Keyes-PetaflopsSeriously-2008.pdf).
- spitfire 16y agoIt's such s shame software isn't available. The cray-1, like the colossus are important parts of world history. I'm more than a little jelous that this guy made this and not me. Oh well, some day I'll own an old altix. * HN should have more of this, less ify/.ly dotcoms.
- js4all 16y agoThis is fantastic.
- wazoox 16y agoThe X-MP will be a tougher nut to crack, but I think the software may be easier to find.
- viraptor 16y agoWell - at least one fact can be confirmed now - Cray does scale :) (-down, mostly)