11 ms·
The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
- awacs 8mo agoI 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.
- hulitu 8mo ago> I'd love to do an order of magnitude comparison to a modern M4 Mac... Amazing how far we've come. Yes, would be nice to compare the capabilities (multiuser, multitasking, security, RCE). Did we get _so_ far ? How many users can a Mac sustain ?
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agoCray 1 - 160 MFLOPS M4 CPU - 280 GFLOPS M4 GPU - 2900 GFLOPS
- fghorow 8mo agoI just did a BOTE calculation for my iPhone (A17 Pro chip; GPU rated at 4 Tflops). According to the sales blurbage in TFA, the Cray 1 performed at 80 Mflops. (Yes, that is OBVIOUSLY not comparing apples to Apples -- pun intended). Unless I've dropped a decimal point, my iPhone is (capable of) 50,000 times the floating point speed of a Cray 1. In my back pocket. To watch cat videos.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoI remember computer magazines of the time talking about "a Cray on a chip" in their April 1st jokes. Well... we're there. Far past, in fact. We live in the future that then was so far out of reach that people could only joke about it, not consider it a realistic possibility. In one lifetime.
- LordGrey 8mo ago[dead]
- ggm 8mo agoto 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)
- bilegeek 8mo ago> the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in. Aerospace originally did that to reduce component size, CDC and IBM took advantage of the standard in the early 60's. Strangely, it seems mainframes didn't adopt switching power supplies until the end of the 70's, despite the tech being around since the end of the 60's.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago400 Hz is really the next best thing to a switching supply, as the transformers and filter capacitors can be smaller than they would need to be at 50/60 Hz. It can save cost and space for filter capacitors, especially in a three-phase system where there's not as much ripple to deal with. Another rationale may have been that the flywheel on the motor-generator would cover a multitude of power-quality sins.
- twoodfin 8mo agoThe 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.
- fnord77 8mo agoNot terribly impressive considering an average 20 year old super computer c. 2005 is still about 100x as fast as today's best consumer cpus
- twoodfin 8mo agoWell, yeah, Dennard scaling ended around 20 years ago!
- firecall 8mo agoI wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is? Sometimes I like to remind myself we are living in the future. A future that seemed like SciFi when I was a kid in the 70s! Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
- FridayoLeary 8mo agoAt the risk of sounding cliche i'll point out that ios probably uses several times the capacity of a cray 1 just to get the keyboard to work.
- estimator7292 8mo agoYes, but the impressive part is that the iPhone does it on a few mW instead of a few MW
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- effnorwood 8mo agoBlew my mind age 4. Then found out about the imos transputer. And robotics magazine. 70's were popping. Ponging?
- SirIsaacGluten 8mo agoInmos not imos, if my memory cells serve ne correctly. I lived overseas at the time, so I did not hear about the Cray till like 1980/81. My friend (we were like 12) had an idea to write a simulator for digital circuits, and I was puzzled as to why you would want to simulate a circuit when you can build it and test it. He was way ahead of his time.
- lukeh 8mo agoXMOS is still keeping the Inmos dream alive, more or less!
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo agoThe Transputer was ahead of it's time, maybe due to anticipating the end of Moore's law a bit too early! The Transputer's inter-chip channel connections remind a bit of Nvidia's NVLink or AMD's Infinity Fabric.
- october8140 8mo ago> 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.
- rabbit817 8mo ago[dead]
- postexitus 8mo agoIt looks really nice - but never understood the seating. Who came up with that?
- wongarsu 8mo agoIt ensures the Cray is placed as the centerpiece of the room, not as mere equipment shoved on the wall
- postexitus 8mo agoProbably they could achieve the same with circular construction but without the seats.
- mark-r 8mo agoThey needed someplace to put the power supplies anyway. The seat cushions just added a touch of whimsy. Could you imagine IBM putting seats around one of their computers?
- t1234s 8mo agoAnswers my question.. I always thought they can't possibly want people sitting on something so expensive.
- tvguide61 8mo agoWhy 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.
- ssl-3 8mo agoOr, you know: Sometimes, a window shade is just a window shade.
- estimator7292 8mo agoIt was the 70s, and that was simply the style at the time.
- fredoralive 8mo agoI suspect the curtains are closed to avoid causing exposure issues etc. in the photos being taken. As for windows in a computer room, seems a bit unusual, but a nicer working environment than the usual windowless box I'd guess...
- bluGill 8mo agoMany computer rooms had windows. Computers were expensive things that companies often wanted to show off - but they needed special rooms with raised floors, HVAC (which also make them look even more exclusive/impressive and worth showing off), and the cost (millions of dollars when senior operators might be making $50k/year) meant you wanted to be careful who could touch them. Thus a window so that you could bring outsiders by the room on the way to a meeting and they could look in and see that shiny equipment. Remember in 1980 the modern PC wasn't even invented (Apple II was) yes. Most people didn't have access to any terminal as part of their job, only specialized positions did. Typewriters where was everyone had on their desk. As such a computer was something a company could wow visitors with. Times have changed.
- DonHopkins 8mo agoI had the cover of this pinned up on my wall! Supercomputer porn.
- DonHopkins 8mo agoI 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.
- technofiend 8mo agoThe Cray 1-ish machines I had access to at Shell and Chevron were most definitely tucked away in rooms with no visibility into them. In fact the Chevron machine room had pretty stern "no photography" placards, which I took seriously and is sadly why I don't have a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine. Getting access took just short an act of God and I was a sysadmin in the central support group! They didn't want us puttering on the machines, so as far as I could tell it mostly sat idle.
- MonkeyClub 8mo ago> a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine. Unsurprisingly, I would say, the Cray is literally the prime example in "A Gallery of Computers as Furniture".[†] [†] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601097
- mark-r 8mo agoI was part of a group from the University of Minnesota that traveled to Chippewa Falls to tour the Cray plant. I expected to see exactly what you describe, the computer behind a big observation window. But instead they took us to a machine that was undergoing final testing before delivery, I think it was serial #5. They were extremely proud of their cooling and invited us to put our hands on the panels in the opening of the C to see how cool it was. I still freak out over thinking about what would have happened if someone had tripped and fallen into all those wires on the inside.
- NL807 8mo agoDocumentation is fantastic.
- 5- 8mo agofor a much more in-depth description of its predecessor, see https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6600.thornton.design_of_a_computer_the_control_data_6600.1970.102630394.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6... i don't think there is a comparable book about the cray-1?
- bytesandbits 8mo agowho was the industrial designer? Cray-1 fits so well it looks straight out of 2001: A space Odyssey
- idatum 8mo agoIn the past few years whenever I re-watch 2001 when Dave is shutting down HAL, I see a spaceship capable data center. And HAL sings "Daisy.." finally at the foundational, bare metal layer.
- themafia 8mo agoCray himself. Here's a talk about designing it. My favorite part is his description of the aluminum machining they had to invent in order to move the freon through the frame to keep the machine from melting. It's a great talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ
- ckastner 8mo agosomewhat related: "Seymour said he thought it was odd that Apple bought a Cray to design Macs because he was using Macs to design Crays. He sent me his designs for the Cray 3 in MacDraw on a floppy.” reports KentK. https://cray-history.net/2021/07/16/apple-computer-and-cray-research-some-notes/ https://cray-history.net/2021/07/16/apple-computer-and-cray-...
- zippyman55 8mo agoMy first time on Cray, I thought I had a core dump, my program ended so quickly. No, the job had finished.
- jeffrallen 8mo agoSame with "go test". :)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 8mo agoAm 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?
- feurio 8mo ago> "The compact mainframe occupies a MERE 70 sq. ft. of floor space." (emphasis mine)
- tvali 8mo agoCompare 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.
- formerly_proven 8mo agoAbsolutely not on the electrical level. ISA emulation, probably, maybe, though these Crays are not IEEE machines so you have to actually fully emulate the floating point operations, instead of punting them to the FPU. That may make getting hundreds of MFLOPs on difficult.
- W-Stool 8mo agoIf 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.
- LgWoodenBadger 8mo agoIn 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???"
- TZubiri 8mo agoBefore 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.)
- Mr_Minderbinder 8mo agoThe latest version of Crafty has a significantly higher rating on CCRL than Fritz 10, the version that defeated Kramnik in 2006. He was the World Champion and was rated 2750 at the time. I do not know what source you used for Crafty’s rating but ratings from different lists are not comparable. It is highly probable that Crafty running on a Ryzen could defeat any human. I am also of the opinion that with an optimised program the CRAY-1 would have been on par with Karpov and Fischer. I also think that Stockfish or some other strong program running on an original Pentium could be on par with Carlsen. I am not sure if Crafty’s licence would count as FOSS.
- lebuffon 8mo agoI quickly skimmed the instruction set and did not see anything resembling a sub-routine call or branch and link instruction. Did I miss it?
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo agoThe "R exp" is subroutine call (which saves return address to register B00), and I believe "J Bjk" is the subroutine return. The Cray-1 didn't have a hardware stack, so subroutine call is basically just jump there and back, using a register for the return address rather than pushing/popping it to/from the stack. Another oddity of the instruction set that stands out (since I'm in process of defining a VM ISA for a hobby project) is that the branch instructions test a register (A0 or S0) rather than look at status flags. In a modern CPU a conditional branch, if (x < y), is implemented by compare then branch where the compare instruction sets flags as if it had done a subtraction, but doesn't actually modify the accumulator. In the Cray this is evidentially done by doing an actual subtraction, leaving the result in A0, then branching by looking at the value of A0 (vs looking at flags set by CMP). Gemini explains this as being to help pipelining.
- commandlinefan 8mo agoI recall when reading TAOCP that Knuth's MIX assembly supported subroutines by requiring the caller to modify the RET call to it's own address (obviously not re-entrant!). This sort of thing was common when Knuth started in the early 60's, may have still been around by the time of the Cray.
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo agoThis Cray version isn't so bad - it just requires that if the callee itself calls other subroutines, then it has to save/restore this B00 return address register. You could still support re-entrant routines with this as long as you saved/restored the return address to a software stack rather than a fixed location, but I wonder if Cray compilers typically supported that? Apparently the reason for using a register vs stack for return address was because memory access (stack) was so much slower. I'm kinda tempted to use this for the VM I'm designing, which will run on the 6502 8-bit micro. The 6502 doesn't have any 16-bit operations, so pushing and popping using a software defined 16-bit stack pointer is slow, and saving return address to zero page would certainly be faster. It'd mean that rather than always pushing/popping the SP, you only do it in the callee if needed. It's an interesting idea!
- csmoak 8mo agowhenever 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
- dongecko 8mo agoI never realized; thanks for pointing that out. Sneakers is one of my favorite movies.
- AKluge 8mo agoI 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 :)
- commandlinefan 8mo agoAccording to this link https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cray-1-supercomputer-amongst-collection-of-microsoft-co-founder-paul-allens-to-be-auctioned-off/ 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.
- jgalt212 8mo agoHow 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?
- heelix 8mo agoI 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.