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A Cray-1 does 80MFLOPS. 80GFLOPS is around what a current i7 CPU can do. You can't emulate a 80GFLOPS machine in javascript right now. A Cray X-MP is 800MFLOPS
by 4ad 13y ago
A Cray-1 does 80MFLOPS. 80GFLOPS is around what a current i7 CPU can do. You can't emulate a 80GFLOPS machine in javascript right now. A Cray X-MP is 800MFLOPS and a Cray 2 is 1.9GFLOPS. These are not PDP-11s we're talking about here.
Bellard's x86 js emulator, which is as good as it can get, has a performance comparable with a 486. A 486 is slower than a Cray 1. It seems that even today you can't emulate a cray in the browser at native speed, nothing can come close to that 1000 times faster idea.
Please also remember that these system had massive memory bandwidth, and supported non-sequential workloads better than current computers which rely a lot on caches. Even if you can get the emulated peak performance of Cray 1 in javascript, for real tasks that this computers was used for it would be slower.
- pohl 13y agoA Cray-1 does 80MFLOPS. 80GFLOPS is around what a current i7 CPU can do. You can't emulate a 80GFLOPS machine in javascript right now. You switched units from mega to giga there.
- beat 13y agoThe memory architecture is a very good point. It's fundamentally different from the x86-derived systems we all use today. Besides, if you really want to emulate a Cray, it's not the OS that's important so much as that almighty FORTRAN compiler! Part of the fun of working with old Cray guys was listening to the ranting about how FORTRAN is the Best Language Ever and that by removing a layer of memory indirection, it's faster than even C. Of course, you're then hardcoding the living crap out of everything, but that was handwaved away as a minor price to be paid for real performance....
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoWas anyone interested in forth on the cray too?
- 4ad 13y agoNo idea, but my understanding of the architecture is that it wouldn't work well.