The thing that always gets me about the old Crays is how beautiful they were. Functional and elegant in an obscenely complex way. The workmanship and design evident in every connector, board and panel, a showpiece, not just a mass of technology thrown together to brute-force a result, but a finessed and finely tuned collection of components assembled to create something special, a work of art really. Modern machine may SLAUGHTER even the most powerful of Cray's machines, but they never have that eerie feeling of the future embodied that a Cray 2 has...
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JawzX2: Hoon The Earth @ www.cafepress.com/jawzx2 was starred
JawzX2: Hoon The Earth @ www.cafepress.com/jawzx2 was unstarred
@JawzX2, polishing his commenting guns...: That thing in the back was the famous waterfall: the Fluorinert coolant was pumped to the top and ran down the sides of that plexiglas to dissipate heat. IIRC there were some versions with fancy lighting.
I knew a guy in Maryland who owned a Cray, and ran it in his dining room.
He bought it from LearJet for $10K cash, hauled it home in a rented truck, and set it up on the separate 200-amp electrical service he used in that room,which was full of racks. It used a SPARC station as its "BIOS:" you had to log into the SPARC, then tell it to boot the Cray.
@oldgraygeek: That's how pretty much all Crays were and still are: Everything on the computer is controlled and loaded through a second computer. Even the modern XT machines, with Opterons and petabyte disk arrays still get bootstrapped from a small white-box desktop PC.
"Crayolla! It's magic!" one would yell as yet another oiece of brightly colored creativity fuel was dropped from the mighty computer's dispensing system.
Each machine made just one color too, but the name stuck to this very day.
Now of course they have factories turning the things out by the truckload, but THEN, children, THEN it was...different.
Wikipedia says that the size of a data word on a Cray-1 was 64 bits, so 4 megawords would be basically 256 megabytes of RAM.
As for 160 megaflops of processing power, desktop computers are running easily in the gigaflop range, and supercomputers today are well into the teraflop range. Based on the data for the fastest supercomputer listed at top500.org, it would be roughly 9.3 million times faster than a Cray-1.
@longbourne: No, an iPhone 3GS clocks 3x faster. It doesn't have floating point so it's a bad comparison. With a good soft-float library it might be equal.
@Herman: Actually, specs will probably decrease for most consumer products, while their actually computing power doubles because they're that much more efficient, thus saving more battery life.
@twilight-arc: An operating system developed in an insane asylum, coded on a machine that was made using a mix of NEXT computer and TRS-80 hardware. IT'S OS was itself the bastard child of a cross between System 7 and Bravo. The discs which delivered the installer to Oak Ridge National Labratory were themselves said to have been found locked away in an unused room at the Verbatium factory. They were put there because it's said they were haunted by the ghost of a worked who drowned in a data stream.
07/19/09
07/19/09
The thing that always gets me about the old Crays is how beautiful they were. Functional and elegant in an obscenely complex way. The workmanship and design evident in every connector, board and panel, a showpiece, not just a mass of technology thrown together to brute-force a result, but a finessed and finely tuned collection of components assembled to create something special, a work of art really. Modern machine may SLAUGHTER even the most powerful of Cray's machines, but they never have that eerie feeling of the future embodied that a Cray 2 has...
07/19/09
07/19/09
He bought it from LearJet for $10K cash, hauled it home in a rented truck, and set it up on the separate 200-amp electrical service he used in that room,which was full of racks. It used a SPARC station as its "BIOS:" you had to log into the SPARC, then tell it to boot the Cray.
07/19/09
07/19/09
"Crayolla! It's magic!" one would yell as yet another oiece of brightly colored creativity fuel was dropped from the mighty computer's dispensing system.
Each machine made just one color too, but the name stuck to this very day.
Now of course they have factories turning the things out by the truckload, but THEN, children, THEN it was...different.
;)
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Heehee, we're up to teraflops now amirite?
Take that! seventies!
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07/20/09
In Supercomputers yes, but I remember consumer graphics cards hitting the teraflop...
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07/19/09
Wikipedia says that the size of a data word on a Cray-1 was 64 bits, so 4 megawords would be basically 256 megabytes of RAM.
As for 160 megaflops of processing power, desktop computers are running easily in the gigaflop range, and supercomputers today are well into the teraflop range. Based on the data for the fastest supercomputer listed at top500.org, it would be roughly 9.3 million times faster than a Cray-1.
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11/17/08
on the pic above move your mouse wheel and your eyes will start foolin you as though the machine is WARPing (sic!)
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11/12/08
runs fine on the machine i puttogether for under $1000
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It's not the computational power that's missing, it's the algorithm.
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Not a clue what to do with that, perhaps make a ultra-HD holographic video of anything within a mile range.
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Superstring that is.
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