I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray supercomputer, in a computer room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through, of course (all Crays required observations windows to show them off).
Just before a tour group came by, he hid inside the Cray, and waited for them to arrive. Then he casually strolled out from the back of the Cray, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up and saw the tour group, acted startled, then scurried away.
I was a heavy user of the Cray-1, Cray-XMP and Cray-2 at the magnetic fusion computing center at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. One of the important things to remember was that the Crays of this generation were vector processors, that is they carried out operations across multiple elements of arrays at once. If you didn't structure your code properly, you didn't see these extraordinarily high instruction rates.
And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)
The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX (1997) for “ordinary” computers to catch up to its raw performance.
That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
Blew my mind age 4. Then found out about the imos transputer. And robotics magazine. 70's were popping. Ponging?
If these kinds of machines interest you I highly recommend the book "The Supermen" by Charles Murray. It has all the details you would ever want on Seymour Cray and others in the business.
I was working at a geophysical company in the 80's and we lusted after a Cray-1. Best we could afford where array processors (CSPI) connected to VAX systems.
> The aesthetics of the machine have not been neglected. The CPU is attractively housed in a cylindrical cabinet. The chassis are arranged two per each of the twelve wedge-shaped columns. At the base are the twelve power supplies. The power supply cabinets, which extend outward from the base are vinyl padded to provide seating for computer personnel.
for a much more in-depth description of its predecessor, see https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6...
i don't think there is a comparable book about the cray-1?
My first time on Cray, I thought I had a core dump, my program ended so quickly. No, the job had finished.
According to this link https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cray-1-supercompu... these things retailed for $8 million (in 1975 dollars!). That's almost $50,000,000 today - I can't even imagine how much work went into justifying a purchase like that.
Before IBM's deep blue, apparently there was a chess program called Cray Blitz, I'm sure the cray had the raw power(20MHz? But with 64 parallel operations) needed to beat the top humans, but the software just wasn't there yet.
Blitz was ported to C and continued development FOSS as Crafty, mainly by a U of Alabama professor, but to this day it can't beat top humans on modern cpu (topping at 2650 elo instead of 2850 of, say, carlsen.)
Compare this to modern system: we could fully simulate this kind of slow computer in real time, I would guess, with all the wheels, clockwork and mechanics as well as logic circuits with full electricity. Deciding the simulation level would be a bit challenging - is this an atomic, an electron or more common sense simulation -; still I think the simulation would work as well as this kind of document.
Why the thin black curtain on the window?
Thoughts:
1. To block some sunlight from getting in.
2. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent people from looking in.
3. To not have to look at something outside.
4. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent the chance of taking a picture of someone or something outside that could compromise the location of the computer or someone’s identity; sometimes the first place a photogenic computer was built was at a customer site.
I was able to pick up recycled flourinert, which I used for an immersed dual celeron setup. It was mind boggling to see the submerged motherboard chugging away and silence beyond the the soft whir/gurgle of the water pumps. My first CRAYon machine was so messy. I always hoped that it was coolant from our U of MN's Cray.
In college I had an account on our ACM chapter's DEC Alpha, which I used primarily for mudding. Its DNS name was cray-ymp.xxx.xxx.edu, which resulted in more than a few moments of shock/consternation from mods. "You're mudding from a CRAY Y-MP???"
who was the industrial designer? Cray-1 fits so well it looks straight out of 2001: A space Odyssey
> "The compact mainframe occupies a MERE 70 sq. ft. of floor space."
(emphasis mine)
I had the cover of this pinned up on my wall! Supercomputer porn.
I remember doing a report on this in high school in the late 80s. I'd love to do an order of magnitude comparison to a modern M4 Mac... Amazing how far we've come.
Am I right in thinking there are no working Cray-1s?
I know a couple of museums have them, but I don't think any software has ever surfaced, am I right?
How does a vector processor of yore compare to SIMD of the late 90s to the current day? Are they two words for the same thing?
I quickly skimmed the instruction set and did not see anything resembling a sub-routine call or branch and link instruction.
Did I miss it?
Documentation is fantastic.
whenever i hear about a Cray, i'm always reminded of the scene in the movie Sneakers where they sit on one to have a conversation
to deploy a 2nd hand Cray-1 at UQ, we had to raise the ex-IBM 3033 floor, it turned out the bend radius for flourinert was NOT the same as a water cooled machine. We also installed a voltage re-generator which is basically a huge spinning mass, you convert Australian volts to DC, spin the machine, and take off re-generated high frequency volts for the cray, as well as 110v on the right hz for boring stuff alongside. the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.
The flourinert tank has a ball valve, like a toilet cistern. we hung a plastic lobster in ours, because we called the cray "Yabbie" (Queensland freshwater crayfish)
That re-generator, the circuit breakers are .. touchy. the installation engineer nearly wet his trousers flipping on, the spark-bang was immense. Brown trouser moment.
The front end access was Unisys X11 Unix terminals. They were built like a brick shithouse (to use the australianism) but were a nice machine. I did the acceptance testing, it included running up X11 and compiling and running the largest Conways game of life design I could find on the net. Seemed to run well.
We got the machine as a tax-offset for a large Boeing purchase by Australian defence. End of life, one of the operators got the love-seat and turned it into a wardrobe in his bedroom.
Another, more boring cray got installed at department of primary industries (Qld government) to do crops and weather modelling. The post cray-1 stuff was .. more ordinary. Circular compute unit was a moment in time.
(I think I've posted most of this to HN before)