6 ms·

Cray Simulator (X-MP, Y-MP-el, J90, SV1)

jensgk 5y ago
Cool, is there any application software for it?
- blackhaz 5y ago
  Can it run Doom?
  - retrac 5y ago
    Well, Carmack took the question at least a little seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494648 tl;dr: Quite probably. It's certainly fast enough, but it's an awkward beast without byte-addressed memory. (Also, there's the minor problem that there's no video hardware.)
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      > Also, there's the minor problem that there's no video hardware. I believe there were a few frame buffers available. IIRC, the movie "The Last Starfighter" had their VFX rendered on an Y-MP and they would require some form of pre-visualization during the production process, but transfers from render to viz could be achieved with network or magnetic storage sneakernet.
      - ahefner 5y ago
        If there's anything halfway plausible that could've been connected directly to the Cray, this is a golden opportunity for someone to write the first demo on an exceptionally historic platform. Good luck ever seeing it running on real hardware, though.
        watersb 5y ago
        In that era, rendering of the frame buffer was often performed by writing to a film slide recorder. That is, it streamed a bitmap to a printer that wrote to optical film stock. We had a slide recorder at one of my early IT jobs. IIRC, it was at output device for a Macintosh computer, which meant that it was technically my responsibility to keep running, but it was a special beast so I would basically check to see if it was plugged in correctly and not on fire; for anything else, I would call the vendor that leased it to us. I'm pretty sure that the film stock, once written, needed to be developed like any other photo film, but that was 30 years ago and I just can't recall. But sure, kid: write a demoscene for it. 0.0005 frames per second...
        ahefner 5y ago
        I'm not sure that qualifies as halfway (or even remotely) plausible, but with sufficient pipelining (tens of thousands of optical printers with parallel IO hardware and an equal number of people developing slides and loading them up), miracles may be possible. Given resources on the scale of the Apollo program, you could make some super sick demos. Way cooler than collecting moon rocks. Joking aside, this essentially hardcopy-to-film is a thing that I never considered existing, yet sounds completely plausible. Even so, a color framebuffer with a CRT attached was certainly not unobtainium by the early to mid 80s.
        watersb 5y ago
        Absolutely, yes color frame buffers and CRT display was widely available. The Cromemco S-100 bus computers were used for television news weather visualization and for engineering applications. Hmm. I think perhaps the limit was on resolution and color depth. The movie "TRON" was done with slide recorders, and now I have another rabbit hole to dig out of! (The BYTE Magazine article that had me thinking of high end graphics at the time, and the use of film as output, is from November 1982. I was in 8th grade and read every page of these monstrous, 400-page times. Like the Sears Christmas catalog, every month.) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n49/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n49/m... (I could just go ask the old Cray-1 that's a block up the street from here, but he is now a museum display and doesn't talk much.)
johnklos 5y ago
We used to compare the speed of new & fast computers to the VAX 11/780, then to the Cray-1. Now we can buy a computer that exceeds the speed and memory of a Cray-1 for $10 and lose it in between couch cushions. What we're missing, though, is excitement about this. Tell a group of high schoolers in the mid '80 that they'd have a chance to run whatever they wanted on a Cray-1 for an hour, and they'd come up with all sorts of ideas. Today? They have all this power and much, much more, but most people don't care very much. It's a real shame that Cray supercomputers were used to model weather, to calculate ideal parameters for fusion experiments, to design other computer systems, to start the computer visual effects world, yet we have so little software from these machines. I'm very happy to see this preservation effort.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I was in High School when the Cray X-MP was the world's fastest computer. There were a few nerds in my physics class that talked about it, but the vast majority of the high school would have had no idea what it was nor would they have found it interesting.
- protomyth 5y ago
  DOE used to run a high school student summer program for a week at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The students would get to program on one of the Crays that the lab had. They even got to print out documentation (paper and microfiche).
cridenour 5y ago
Been reading Jurassic Park for the first time and love their shock and awe that InGen had shipped multiple XMPs to their island.
- geenew 5y ago
  “A multi xmp system?!” is the quote I think. That line always stuck with me. Kind of a disappointment really that the movie had a thinking machine instead of a cray; the thinking machine had a lot of blinkenlights but the cray was always cooler imho.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > cray was always cooler imho. Nothing can be cooler than a computer with 65535 processors ;-) And 1024 blinkenlights. OTOH, you could sit on the Cray.
rbanffy 5y ago
I hope this triggers efforts that result in the preservation of the software in these remarkable machines. And, maybe, allow us to emulate the Cray-2 and Cray-3 as well. Maybe even finish the Cray-4... The Cray-3 had some pretty clever ideas: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014064746/http://www.byte.com/art/9506/sec10/art4.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20081014064746/http://www.byte.c... Now, on a slightly more serious tone, does someone have enough software to start a Thinking Machines' CM-1 or CM-2?

Cool, is there any application software for it?

blackhaz 5y ago
Can it run Doom?
- retrac 5y ago
  Well, Carmack took the question at least a little seriously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494648 tl;dr: Quite probably. It's certainly fast enough, but it's an awkward beast without byte-addressed memory. (Also, there's the minor problem that there's no video hardware.)
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Also, there's the minor problem that there's no video hardware. I believe there were a few frame buffers available. IIRC, the movie "The Last Starfighter" had their VFX rendered on an Y-MP and they would require some form of pre-visualization during the production process, but transfers from render to viz could be achieved with network or magnetic storage sneakernet.
    - ahefner 5y ago
      If there's anything halfway plausible that could've been connected directly to the Cray, this is a golden opportunity for someone to write the first demo on an exceptionally historic platform. Good luck ever seeing it running on real hardware, though.
      - watersb 5y ago
        In that era, rendering of the frame buffer was often performed by writing to a film slide recorder. That is, it streamed a bitmap to a printer that wrote to optical film stock. We had a slide recorder at one of my early IT jobs. IIRC, it was at output device for a Macintosh computer, which meant that it was technically my responsibility to keep running, but it was a special beast so I would basically check to see if it was plugged in correctly and not on fire; for anything else, I would call the vendor that leased it to us. I'm pretty sure that the film stock, once written, needed to be developed like any other photo film, but that was 30 years ago and I just can't recall. But sure, kid: write a demoscene for it. 0.0005 frames per second...
        ahefner 5y ago
        I'm not sure that qualifies as halfway (or even remotely) plausible, but with sufficient pipelining (tens of thousands of optical printers with parallel IO hardware and an equal number of people developing slides and loading them up), miracles may be possible. Given resources on the scale of the Apollo program, you could make some super sick demos. Way cooler than collecting moon rocks. Joking aside, this essentially hardcopy-to-film is a thing that I never considered existing, yet sounds completely plausible. Even so, a color framebuffer with a CRT attached was certainly not unobtainium by the early to mid 80s.
        watersb 5y ago
        Absolutely, yes color frame buffers and CRT display was widely available. The Cromemco S-100 bus computers were used for television news weather visualization and for engineering applications. Hmm. I think perhaps the limit was on resolution and color depth. The movie "TRON" was done with slide recorders, and now I have another rabbit hole to dig out of! (The BYTE Magazine article that had me thinking of high end graphics at the time, and the use of film as output, is from November 1982. I was in 8th grade and read every page of these monstrous, 400-page times. Like the Sears Christmas catalog, every month.) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n49/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n49/m... (I could just go ask the old Cray-1 that's a block up the street from here, but he is now a museum display and doesn't talk much.)

We used to compare the speed of new & fast computers to the VAX 11/780, then to the Cray-1. Now we can buy a computer that exceeds the speed and memory of a Cray-1 for $10 and lose it in between couch cushions. What we're missing, though, is excitement about this. Tell a group of high schoolers in the mid '80 that they'd have a chance to run whatever they wanted on a Cray-1 for an hour, and they'd come up with all sorts of ideas. Today? They have all this power and much, much more, but most people don't care very much. It's a real shame that Cray supercomputers were used to model weather, to calculate ideal parameters for fusion experiments, to design other computer systems, to start the computer visual effects world, yet we have so little software from these machines. I'm very happy to see this preservation effort.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I was in High School when the Cray X-MP was the world's fastest computer. There were a few nerds in my physics class that talked about it, but the vast majority of the high school would have had no idea what it was nor would they have found it interesting.
protomyth 5y ago
DOE used to run a high school student summer program for a week at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The students would get to program on one of the Crays that the lab had. They even got to print out documentation (paper and microfiche).

cridenour 5y ago

Been reading Jurassic Park for the first time and love their shock and awe that InGen had shipped multiple XMPs to their island.

geenew 5y ago
“A multi xmp system?!” is the quote I think. That line always stuck with me. Kind of a disappointment really that the movie had a thinking machine instead of a cray; the thinking machine had a lot of blinkenlights but the cray was always cooler imho.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > cray was always cooler imho. Nothing can be cooler than a computer with 65535 processors ;-) And 1024 blinkenlights. OTOH, you could sit on the Cray.

rbanffy 5y ago

I hope this triggers efforts that result in the preservation of the software in these remarkable machines. And, maybe, allow us to emulate the Cray-2 and Cray-3 as well. Maybe even finish the Cray-4... The Cray-3 had some pretty clever ideas: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014064746/http://www.byte.com/art/9506/sec10/art4.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20081014064746/http://www.byte.c... Now, on a slightly more serious tone, does someone have enough software to start a Thinking Machines' CM-1 or CM-2?