7 ms·
Homebrew Cray-1A
- dang 7y agoFor the curious, the past threads with one or more comments appear to be: 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16756994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16756994 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8447518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8447518 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291515 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4561787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4561787 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621177 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1645291
- KingFelix 7y agodang thats a lot of reposts!
- davidbarker 7y agoOh. That’s strange — I got an email from Hacker News this morning asking me to repost it because it didn’t gain traction originally, so I reposted it.
- dang 7y agoOh yes, we sent that. The existence of past threads doesn't make a repost off topic! Reposts are fine after a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. "It didn't get traction originally" was referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660889, not to the links above.
- davidbarker 7y agoAhhh, OK. Thanks for the clarification.
- dang 7y agoI'm still looking for a sufficiently brief way to make that distinction clear, because it gets misunderstood unfortunately.
- djmips 7y agoPeople are so weary of this that there aren't even the usual requests to put a date on the title of the original post.
- m463 7y agoIt's like the story of the ground speed check from the SR-71 pilot. (on the other hand, this is the first time I heard about the cray replica)
- KingFelix 7y agoThis is awesome and I want to build one for my home, inside of a Tardis
- jdkee 7y agoIIRC, a working Cray inside of a traveling Tardis collapses the whole thing into a black hole.
- fentonc 7y agoThis really has been posted here a lot - Well, for those following along at home, this story actually got a relatively recent update - as of this spring, the 1/10-scale Cray-1A is now residing next to its bigger self in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!
- mark-r 7y agoI remember seeing a story about a replica Cray-1 in miniature some time ago. Was wondering if this was the same machine. The Cray-1 was really distinctive in so many ways. Sounds like a fitting end for the project.
- MrMorden 7y agoDid the FOIA requests include NSA? You’d want a copy of FOLKLORE if it’s releasable; there’s at least one Cryptolog article about it that’s been declassified. https://www.google.com/search?q=cray+%22folklore%22+site%3Ansa.gov https://www.google.com/search?q=cray+%22folklore%22+site%3An...
- fentonc 7y agoIt did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I got a similar letter from the NNSA. Through a friend-of-a-friend, I did actually manage to get a copy of the source code to CTSS, the cray time sharing system, on microfiche from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and I even had it digitized (but not OCR'd), but it's written in a language called COMPASS i've never found a compiler for.
- greenyoda 7y agoCOMPASS was the name of the assembler language for the earlier supercomputers that Seymour Cray designed while he was still working at CDC, such as the CDC 6000-series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPASS
- 7y ago
- ralphc 7y agoThe Computer Museum of America, in Roswell, GA, has a large collection of Crays. They may have, or can provide leads, on software. https://computermuseumofamerica.org https://computermuseumofamerica.org
- linker3000 7y agoWhen I was working on a project (only a few weeks) at EPFL in Lausanne, they had two or three of their old Crays spread around the campus as static show pieces - maybe they still have some software.
- bytematic 7y agoThey had to use a tall skinny woman and a short woman to hook wires up from the inside. Shortest path between any point is the best way to increase speed. Love cray, you get a case of beer when you buy one!
- cromulent 7y agoThese are such interesting comments. Any links to read more about them?
- mark-r 7y agoI assume the beer was Leinenkugel's?
- mark-r 7y agoFor those unaware, Leinenkugel's is made in Cray's home town of Chippewa Falls.
- m463 7y agoWas it the CDC that had all the wires hanging out the side, all of them the exact same length for timing?
- duskwuff 7y ago> The actual design was implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. This is basically the biggest FPGA you can buy that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars for a devkit. Note that this bit is rather outdated. :) The FPGA on an entry-level development board (like a Xilinx Artix-7 35T) is comparable in size -- as well as much faster! -- and you can go even bigger without stretching your budget too much. If you're willing to get a little adventurous, in fact, you can get an FPGA that's over ten times the size for under $200: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32907109444.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32907109444.html
- ansible 7y agoI'd recommend going with Digilent for FPGA development: https://store.digilentinc.com/fpga-for-beginners/ https://store.digilentinc.com/fpga-for-beginners/ For some products, such as their Zynq 7000 dev boards, you can also get a cheap time-limited copy of Xilinx SDSoC which allows easier device driver development to the programmable logic side: https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-z7-apsoc-zynq-7000-develo...
- fentonc 7y agoI really need to make an updated blog post about it, but this project evolved into a reasonably-well-debugged Cray J90 core that fits quite comfortably in a Xilinx Artix-7 35T board (I made a somewhat bulky Cray J90 Smartwatch that tells time by running a real-time n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons . . . inferring the current time is left as an exercise for the viewer).
- pstuart 7y agoI could only aspire to such awesome geekiness. Thank you for making the world a more interesting place.
- aj7 7y agoHeh heh. “Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?” NO, I want an 11 Pro with them three cameras!! (But I am waiting for someone to emulate a Cray on a phone.)
- pmiller2 7y agoI actually think gutting one of the cases to use as a couch would be super awesome. It could definitely be the centerpiece of a living, room, den, or home office.
- pugworthy 7y agoFacing apart from each other, it's more like something you put in the middle of the room during parties - so all the people watchers can sit there and look out, but not interact with each other.
- rs23296008n1 7y agoMake it rotate. Add a light show. See the whole room. Bonus points when people get drunk/"altered states".
- pfdietz 7y agoTurn a Cray-2 into an actual aquarium.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoBe sure to stock it with crayfish.
- aj7 7y agoNever underestimate the nerds on YC. Want to lose points? Make fun of time wasting nostalgia projects. Make fun of anything cellular automata. Never fails.
- TomVDB 7y agoThe recovery of the data from the HD is particularly impressive: http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrisulloa 7y ago> computational necromancy Haven't you read laundry files? You could accidentally summon an alien horror from another dimension.
- gpderetta 7y agoDid you see the shape of that thing? It obviously hides a well grounded summoning grid.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoApple had a Cray X-MP at one point.
- dboreham 7y agoOne of my wife's (of 20+ years) pickup lines, that worked, apparently, on me was she said she could get me in to sit on a Cray-1.
- teh-oldz0rz 7y agoDated pre-2011. quote: **UPDATE** The project is now hosted on Google code [0], and is morphing into a single-CPU Cray X-MP with a working copy of COS 1.17: The Cray-1X Project [0] https://code.google.com/archive/p/cray-1x/source/default/commits?page=3 https://code.google.com/archive/p/cray-1x/source/default/com...
- nwallin 7y ago> This has some interesting implications – there’s no ‘divide’ instruction, for instance, because it can take a variable amount of time to finish. To perform a divide, you need to first compute the ‘reciprocal approximation’ (something we can do in exactly 13 cycles, it turns out) of the denominator value, and then perform a separate multiply of that result with the numerator. Note that the special sauce behind this is the same as the special sauce behind fast inverse square root. The integer bitwise components of a floating point number permit a really good approximation of the log base 2 of it. And once you have the log base 2 of a number simple arithmetic does interesting operations. log2(x^-.5) = -.5 \* log2(x) log2(x^-1) = -log2(x) The same trick can be used to calculate any constant power over the range [-1,1]. -.5 is the most famous for whatever reason, probably because of the "what the fuck?" comment in the open source quake code. I'm not entirely sure why this knowledge was known at Cray, then lost, and had to be rediscovered at SGI or whatever. And I'm not entirely convinced it ever was lost. But if it was lost, I imagine it had something to do with replacing engineers whose bread and butter was done on a sliderule (which is inherently built on the premise of manipulating logs of numbers) with engineers who always had a pocket calculator.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago> The same trick can be used to calculate any constant power over > the range [-1,1]. -.5 is the most famous for whatever reason, > probably because of the "what the fuck?" comment in the open. > source quake code. That was an interesting read, thanks!
- m463 7y agoI remember when I was learning 6502 it didn't have an add instruction. You had to clear carry, then add with carry.
- srcmap 7y agoCray 1 was built 45 years ago. Iphone is 10x that system today. Fun to imagine what the computer might look like 45 years from now - everyone will have a gigabits quantum computer in their pocket?
- joefourier 7y agoDo note that that blogpost is almost ten years old. At peak power, the latest iPhone is now probably around 3000x faster than the Cray 1 if you count the GPU (although finding FP64 performance stats for the iPhone is bit challenging).
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI used Cray and huge CDC mainframes way back when. Fun stuff. That said, my Linux laptop with a 1070 GPU and CUDA does about seven trillion float operations a second. For modern times, the old mainframes don’t seem useful.