14 ms·
Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
- timthorn 3y agoThe author's CV is as interesting as the benchmarks
- earthscienceman 3y agolink?
- timthorn 3y agoI'm referring to the same page, under the "Background Activities" heading
- morbusfonticuli 3y agowww.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets.htm#anchor1
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoThe author has the most British name ever.
- z3phyr 3y agoThe most British name belongs to Lord British.
- snvzz 3y agoIt'd make more sense to compare with a RISC-V that has Vector 1.0. Because a vector machine is what it was.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWell, or compare to a GPU or a TPU
- snvzz 3y agoThose are largely simd but not vector.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThat's fair. I haven't spent any time looking through the RISC-V vector extensions yet. I look forward to it, though.
- rwmj 3y agoThey are said to be "inspired" by classic Cray vector instructions, although I have of course never used a Cray :-( so I can't comment on how true that is. I did use a Convex C2[0] for a while which also had real vector instructions, but it was all hidden behind a compiler option. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_Computer
- dan-robertson 3y agoHow is vector different from simd?
- IshKebab 3y agoThe RISC-V Vector extension allows the vector length to vary at runtime whereas with SIMD the vector length is fixed at compile time (128 bit, 256 bit etc.). It means the code is more portable basically. With x86 SIMD the standard solution is to compile the same code multiple times for different SIMD widths (using different instructions) and then detect the CPU at runtime. Though that is such a pain that it's only really done in explicitly numerical libraries (Numpy, Eigen, etc.). In theory with Vector you can compile once, run anywhere.
- BMc2020 3y ago"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1" edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.
- wolfgang42 3y ago"The comment above was for the 2012 Pi 1. In 2020, the Pi 400 average Livermore Loops, Linpack and Whetstone MFLOPS reached 78.8, 49.5 and 95.5 times faster than the Cray 1." Apart from the Cray-1, that whole section is also worth reading for some interesting insights into relative speed differences between various modern CPUs as well. (Though I do wish it was presented in table rather than narrative form, it’d be a lot easier to follow that way; there are also more detailed tables further down the page.)
- LarsDu88 3y agoOk, do Pi 5 now
- moffkalast 3y agoMultiply Pi 4 results by 3 and you have the rough ballpark.
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jbverschoor 3y agoI’m more impressed that the cray was that fast such a long time ago tbh
- hooverd 3y agoThe RPi, unlike the Cray-1, does not offer ample sitting space.
- wolfgang42 3y agoSomebody made a Cray-themed Pi Zero cluster which perhaps fits the bill (if you’re a mouse, that is): https://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html https://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html
- linker3000 3y agoThere's also a Z80 build. https://rc2014.co.uk/1865/crayzee-eighty/ https://rc2014.co.uk/1865/crayzee-eighty/
- geerlingguy 3y agoNor does it have quite the panache in its spartan design.
- tom_ 3y agoBut for the price of the Cray, even without adjusting for inflation, you could buy a useful number of chairs. And just think of the electricity cost savings!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 3y agoIt's not just for sitting. The ultimate hacker fantasy is to get laid on a Cray-1 couch!
- m463 3y agoyeah, the pi cases have been disappointing. Few have adequate cooling. (flirc is good, the ones with fans are just annoying) I'd love to have a pi case that had a built-in breadboard. ...or a case with comfortable seating.
- nullhole 3y agoThere's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system. Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.
- Firerouge 3y agoThe lack of I/O to the cpu might be the counterpoint to this. A single (exposed) PCIe lane might be enough for any singular task, but you're likely to start bogging down your bandwidth if you need to do any serious simultaneous tasks like network above a gbit, nvme disk IO, additional display or additional parallel computing like a GPU.
- Cacti 3y agoit’s easy to forget how many bits needs to be pushed down a graphics pipeline, per pixel, per frame. in fact forget the pipeline, just pushing the bits down the wire fast enough is a non-trivial task.
- nullhole 3y agoI agree. I was a bit too flip in my original comment; there are regular tasks now that simply require multiples of the data throughput that the 1980s Cray machines were capable of. The simpler point I was aiming at was just that: the amount of computational power at the fingertips of so many of us is huge, and it's important to appreciate that.
- Uehreka 3y ago> Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. As someone who uses them for a variety of purposes, I gotta note that they have pretty huge limitations. Like, the moment graphics enter the picture (no pun intended) you’re moving an order of magnitude slower than most desktops or laptops. Not to mention that support for hardware video encode/decode (which, especially decode, we generally take for granted) aren’t always available depending on the library or tool you’re working with. Like yes, you can totally run a serviceable web server on a Pi and serve a blog or a small web app, but let’s not get carried away here.
- qingcharles 3y agoI'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen. "I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?" "That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?" Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThe other fun thing is to find out the most recent year your phone would have made the bottom of the top 500 list.
- bifftastic 3y agoLooks like June 2002 for Pixel 8
- hulitu 3y agoMy phone is so dumb down that any comparison is useless. It is like driving a Ferrari through a corn field.
- shagie 3y agoOne of my favorite machines from Top500 is SystemX. https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ When it was commissioned in 2004, this array of 1100x Apple PowerPC 970 systems was the 7th most powerful computer on the list. It's Linpack Performance was 12,250.00 GFlop/s.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
- Havoc 3y agoFor a second there I thought there was a new sbc called cray. Well played
- fastneutron 3y agoWhen I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations today on something like a RPi. Weather/climate models? Rad-hydro? The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to try.
- ip26 3y agoYou could always start with loading up Spec ‘06, which contains micro kernels of such “heroic” workloads.
- simbolit 3y agoOne of the early customers was the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, so, wild guess, they probably used it for medium-range weather forecasts.
- ithkuil 3y ago> they probably used it for medium-range weather forecasts in europe
- defrost 3y agoFWiW Australia used a CDC Cyber 205 for occassional weather modelling and other mathematical work in the early 1980s. ( There was a seperate dedicated weather computer, this one was used for 'other' jobs like speculative weather modelling, monster group algebraic fun, et al.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber The UK was the first customer: In 1980, the successor to the Cyber 203, the Cyber 205 was announced. The UK Meteorological Office at Bracknell, England was the first customer and they received their Cyber 205 in 1981.
- pietjepuk88 3y agoI thought the ECMWF models were (and always have been) global?
- whitej125 3y agoYears ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”
- utopcell 3y agoSmart kid, thinking out of the box!
- speed_spread 3y agoIt comes naturally when the box is so small!
- zx8080 3y ago:) Did showing raspPi to your daughter have any result (like interested in tech or anything)?
- whitej125 3y agoHonestly she loves all her subjects in school. I’d say the “engineering tendency” that she picked up from her mom and I (both eng) is the desire the go deep on learning something. I see it when it comes to math, but equally see it when it comes to music or history.
- tonymet 3y agoHave you seen houses from the 1920s -- she's not that far off
- lagniappe 3y agothey say the 2020's is the new 1920's in that regard
- bboygravity 3y agoHave you seen (tiny) houses in 2023s (large cities) -- she's not that far off.
- blackoil 3y agoIs there any software apart from benchmarks that will make it feel that fast. All softwares that I use feel more advanced version of things that I ran on my 386. GUI, IDE, compiler, office... I understand that the exercise may still be theoretical as any sw used by Met now will be designed for million time fast computers. But there should exist some software that would have required Cray to run then.
- xcv123 3y agoNo. The Cray-1 ran batch processing jobs, mostly scientific simulations which took hours or days to compute. It had a terminal interface and wasn't used for real time interactive applications.
- timthorn 3y agoIIRC, in real world installations the Cray would have been paired with a minicomputer or mainframe.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoSo should we pair with a PiPDP-11?:)
- flyinghamster 3y agoThe Wiki article on the Cray-1 indicates that it had a Data General Eclipse as its front-end processor.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoIt was a later machine than the Cray-1, but I remember seeing a post on the jsoftware forums from someone that ran interactive APL on a Cray. Having a REPL to access a machine like that in that era must have been quite something.
- pinewurst 3y agoCrays were not good interactive machines for a few reasons, but lacking virtual memory was the most notable.
- mikewarot 3y agoI wonder where a Raspberry Pi Pico - based on the RP2040 fits in all of that.
- dgacmu 3y agoA lot slower - roughly 100x - because most of these benchmarks measure FLOPS and the rp2040 doesn't have native floating point, so it has to emulate it, taking it down to 1-3 MFLOPS vs the 160 MFLOPS of the cray-1. If you compared integer operations it would be a lot closer, but that's not really what the cray was designed for. (The rp2040 at 125mhz * 2 cores is in a pretty similar range)
- DonHopkins 3y agoThe Cray-1 has a much better couch.
- qgin 3y agoWe need to bring back computer seating
- Y_Y 3y agoI've sat on my raspi 3b a couple of times. Can't honestly recommend it.
- ianburrell 3y agoMake seats that are 19" wide and meant to go in front of racks. Or ones that are rack-mounted and pull out.
- Animats 3y agoThe Cray-1's padded seats cover the power supplies. I was sad to see the Cray-1 at the Computer Museum in Mountain View being used as storage for catering supplies for some event in the lobby.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- webprofusion 3y agoDude fix your website certificate, come on.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoThis site is served over plain HTTP. Not only does he not need to fix anything, you should fix your broken web browser that's "upgrading" to HTTPS when no one, especially the site owner, asked it to.
- DonHopkins 3y agoI knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray-1 supercomputer, in a machine room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through. Just before a big tour group of VIPs he knew would come by, he hid inside the Cray-1, and waited patiently for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from inside the Cray-1, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up startled at the tour group gaping at him through the window, and scurried off!
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- codezero 3y agoTo which they said, "Urine; A lot of trouble."
- qgin 3y agoIt's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.
- avg_dev 3y agosuch a dystopian future... I hope we are not still using plastic then :)
- niederman 3y agoHow is this dystopian? Plastic is a really great material -- and way more eco-friendly than metal for building computers. It's only mass-produced single-use plastics like water bottles that are bad for the environment.
- huytersd 3y agoI wish we could come up with a plastic that would biodegrade after a fixed amount of time say 200 years.
- b112 3y agoYou want the stored carbon in plastics to escape?? The best outcome for plastics, would be to bury them very deep (like nuclear waste), where they could eventually become some new oil like substance. No carbon escape.
- huytersd 3y agoYeah but no one is burying the plastic, it’s too expensive. So realistically I’d much rather have the plastic breakdown so it’s not everywhere for 10k years.
- 3y ago
- boznz 3y agoThis is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.
- Dork1234 3y agoYou can always replace them with RP2040 which have integer performance similar to the Cray-1 if that makes you feel better.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoEsp32 ( https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 ) are what most folks should be using to do that stuff. It’s a great platform to build upon.
- throwup238 3y agoESPHome even comes with a well thought out sprinkler controller module: https://esphome.io/components/sprinkler.html https://esphome.io/components/sprinkler.html It supports valves, pumps, schedules, etc. I programmed mine once a few years ago with YAML (no code!) and now I just power cycle them once every month or so. Been running great.
- speed_spread 3y agoI've come to the conclusion that the value of the RPI is not so much in the hardware platform but rather in being the cheapest Linux running computer you can buy. Its much easier to program for than any embedded board.
- topspin 3y ago> Its much easier to program for than any embedded board. Indeed. I work in both MCUs and full-featured Linux environments and there is zero value to using the former for non-safety critical, non-power constrained, low precision applications. Running a sprinkler system on an RPi is an entirely reasonable choice: you have ample storage for history, trivially simple remote control using a variety of protocols and media and ample compute to operate high level languages and run easily maintained programs, including nice-to-haves like continuous integration of public weather data to optimize your schedule against prevailing rainfall. Can you shoehorn all that into a ESP32 + micropython or whatever? Sure. I'll bet someone already has. And they spent 10x the time it would have taken otherwise. At least.
- travisgriggs 3y agoThe article has Android phone comparisons. Any idea how the iPhones stack up against the Cray-1?
- hulitu 3y agoMy Android phone can not do any batch processing out of the box. You need 3 layers of emulation to be able to run a shell.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoI'm waiting for the follow-up from Jeff Geerling where he fits a Raspberry Pi into a Cray-1 enclosure.
- arbitrandomuser 3y agoOr as many as he can with networking
- squarefoot 3y agoI would totally love a Cray1 shaped PC enclosure. A even smaller one for Raspberry Pis would also be cool.
- smcameron 3y agohttps://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2610764 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2610764
- internet101010 3y agoI've gone through the pi rabbit hole to the kubernetes/swarm level. Just skip that stuff at this point and get a mini pc. The money comes out to be the same and I promise it is way less of a hassle.
- fuzztester 3y agoWhat make and model would you recommend for a mini PC? I was thinking of getting one lately.
- nielsole 3y agoI got a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q i5-6500T 4x2.5GHz 8GB RAM 240GB SSD for 100 €. Plenty fast for a couple of VMs with web servers. It's also a lot better for 24/7 than RPi, as I was always struggling with SD card wear
- implements 3y agoSee also Dell OptiPlex 9020 Mini (i5-4590T 4x2GHz 16GB) - that class of “One Litre PC” make an excellent VPS / multi-VM setup.
- fuzztester 3y agoThanks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mherrmann 3y agoTL; DR: ten years ago, Raspberry Pis and Android phones were a handful times faster. Nowadays, they are around 100 times faster. Pretty impressive, considering they fit in our pockets.
- hulitu 3y agoThank god they have a modern OS to slow them down. /s
- moffkalast 3y agoNo /s required, Wirth's law holds far more solidly than Moore's law. You may live to see man made software bloat beyond your comprehension.
- benj111 3y agoThe pi Pico would be an interesting comparison. It doesn't have an fpu, and not much ram so it might actually be a close race for some of these tests.
- moffkalast 3y agoWell I'm anxiously anticipating the first Micropython build for the Cray-1.
- dumbaccount123 3y ago[dead]
- auselen 3y agoRecognizing the domain, you can read about the early history of benchmarks: http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm
- chatnealbot 3y agoi wonder how moore's law figured into the pricing - for a nuclear simulation, makes sense you'd want to pay a lot, or basic science or political things like apollo moon missions, but for weather or commercial applications, if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away, though there's marketing aspect of how advanced your product is.. maybe this was before moores law though
- kergonath 3y ago> if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away And then you don’t get anything done because there is always a better computer just around the corner. Most of the time, proposals are written for hardware that already exist and don’t need the absolute best. If you have some CFD or MHD calculations to do for a rocket engine or a nuclear reactor, you don’t care about the computer on which it ran, just that it ran on time and did not hold the whole project back. Even cutting edge science does not require cutting edge hardware most of the time. Just like buying a desktop next year won’t help you play games today, at some point you have to settle and accept that your hardware will be outdated by the time it comes online (it’s a bit better now, but leading HPC clusters still get obsolesced quite quickly). > maybe this was before moores law though The exponential character of available CPU time on larger computers was apparent before Moore’s law.
- dianeb 3y agoAs interesting as this article is as a comparison to a 40 year old supercomputer, the reality is that computers really are artifacts of an era and their place in the progress or regress of technology is possibly valid. Today's world's fastest computer is a Cray: https://www.top500.org/news/frontier-remains-no-1-in-the-top500-but-aurora-with-intels-sapphire-rapids-chips-enters-with-a-half-scale-system-at-no-2 https://www.top500.org/news/frontier-remains-no-1-in-the-top... So, how does the Raspberry Pi stack-up against today's computers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoI remember watching a TV program about wave/fluid simulation (real time?) as a wow-wee demonstration of the power of a Cray-1. In the meantime plenty of colleges and companies were running entire departments on a PDP-11 that had a fraction of the power. Raspberry Pi faster than a Cray-1 is cool benchmark of how far we have come! The Cray had built-in seating though, which the Pi doesn't! :-)
- eschaton 3y agoI ran some comparisons a few years ago between a SPARCstation 20 Model 60 (the system for which the BYTE UNIX Benchmark is calibrated) and Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795324 An original RPi is who it 6-7x the performance of a SPARCstation 20 according to the benchmarks