8 ms·
Well...since this is on HN, I wonder how long it's going to be before the new Cray 1 port of doom comes out.
by grawprog 6y ago
Well...since this is on HN, I wonder how long it's going to be before the new Cray 1 port of doom comes out.
- mhh__ 6y agoHas anyone got one lying around? (It draws a mere 100kW at the wall, I'm guessing no)
- NeutronStar 6y agoOnly 6$ an hour where I live, not bad.
- 83457 6y agoComputer History Museum had one when I stopped by about 10 years ago. Not certain if operational as anything other than a cozy bench. Anyone know?
- mhh__ 6y agoThey used Freon coolant so it's possible they can't/won't
- kens 6y agoNo, the Cray is not operational. Only a few things at the CHM are operational: the PDP-1, the IBM 1401 lab, and the RAMAC disk drive.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoWhen I was in high school we had a PDP System 10 and PDP 11 where I took a programming course on PDP-11 assembly language. It makes me feel old knowing these weren't antiquated at the time.
- ficklepickle 6y agoWow! Did you ever meet Charles Babbage? ;)
- macjohnmcc 6y agoNo but something nearly as bad was typing on punch cards and having to feed them into a card reader to get the code into the computer. And all but one of the terminals was a TTY at 110baud and printed on paper. There was a single Dec VT100/102 terminal you had to get in early to use.
- grawprog 6y agoThis guy made one. https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
- Nomokis 6y agoMan, this guy has some great articles. http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/ I just wish he'd made higher resolution pictures. He's also seriously hardcore (or maybe I feel out of depth because I'm a software guy): > I built a robot that would manually move the head forward 1/5200th of an inch at a time (there are 400 data tracks per inch, so this gives me a whopping 13 steps per data track!), while a high-speed analog-to-digital converter would take the analog signal straight from the drive’s read amplifier and buffer it into an FPGA at a blistering 80 million samples-per-second (like I said earlier, the theme here was overkill…the data was only changing at ~10 MHz or so) Related: http://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files/ http://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files/
- mhh__ 6y agoVery nice. The FPGA thing isn't that inaccessible to normies like us (i.e. some FPGA Dev boards will easily cost thousands and thousands), but the ecosystem is a complete clusterfuck so getting started is the hard bit. Obviously you need to know electronics too but 80MSPS will let you get away with a lot (The term is signal integrity) of bad circuitry (as I can attest to...). Verilog isn't too bad as long as you treat it as a description of a circuit (in a language from the past, not even mentioning VHDL...)
- fentonc 6y agoLol - the 'overkill' approach was mostly one of expediency, since I had spent most of the summer I had to work on this project just trying to get my hands on the disk drive and then powering it on without blowing a fuse. I only had 2-3 weeks to throw everything together, so the 'robot' was basically the Z-stage of a Makerbot 3D printer with some acrylic widgets to push the read-head, then the signal was fed into an analog comparator chip and then into a shift register in my FPGA board. The craziest part is that it worked, and I was able to recover the data!
- quickthrowman 6y agoIt actually has a 150kW 208v 3-phase generator set that provides power to the power distribution cabinet which then uses variacs to transform the voltage to 5v. The genset has a theoretical current output of 415A, pretty serious power! https://www.edn.com/cray-1-super-computer-the-power-supply/ https://www.edn.com/cray-1-super-computer-the-power-supply/
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoJust plug it in at a supercharger.
- EarthLaunch 6y agoLooks like most superchargers supply exactly 150kW (newer ones supplying 250kW) [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoYeah, that was the joke :) It helped put the power draw in perspective for me.
- EarthLaunch 6y agoFor me too, thanks :) Interesting given the decades lag.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSounds like a good thing to not touch by accident...
- CrayBoy 6y agoIt's not Cray if the bowels; don't touch. Merry Christmas. May the light shine upon yous. < 3
- 6y ago
- tinus_hn 6y agoHere’s a simulator: https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
- vidanay 6y agoI'm disappointed they never released a Cray Z computer.