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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(I think I've posted most of this to HN before)
I used a Cray C-90 and T3D 256-core machine from 1995-1999. The T3D used commodity Alpha 21164, and was already behind the T3E when we got it (Cray refurbished.) By the end it was outclassed by an SGI Oxygen box with 8 CPUs. I’d already ported a lot of software from SunOS and HP-UX to Irix and Unicos (Cray) and it was easy to move it to Linux in the end.
> the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.<p>Aerospace originally did that to reduce component size, CDC and IBM took advantage of the standard in the early 60's.<p>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.
There a lot of discussion here <a href="https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7412/why-does-the-cray-2-use-400-hz-power-and-why-generate-that-from-motors" rel="nofollow">https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7412/why-...</a> but nothing seems conclusive.. I would wager the last answer, "IBM was using 400Hz", to be most directly causal reason. The motor-generator configuration might provide galvanic isolation and some immunity to spikes and transients as well?
Cray-1 or Cray-2? IIRC Fluorinert was new with the Cray-2, while wikipedia suggests that the Cray-1 used a freon as coolant.
There you go. Not to doubt what you say, but we definitely had the love seat yet we also had a tank of vaguely flourescing green liquid. Maybe we had some intermediate state, the cray-1 cpu form but the cray-2 upgraded coolant.<p>It wouldn't surprise me if we had the bastard love-child of leftovers from Boeing.
Cray old-timer here; 'nert was definitely Cray-2 and later. In the Cray-3 it was turned into mist.
The GP also mentions X11 Terminals. My wiki-fu shows the X Windowing System came about on or around 1983, while Cray-1 was 1970s vintage. I assume that was an upgrade at some later point.
X Window Release 3 (X11R3) was introduced on Cray into UNICOS (a UNIX variant of Cray OS, COS) in late 1989 using ported 64-bit Xlib. But it was not widely used within small Cray community.<p>But MIT cooked up X11 "PROTOCOL" of Xlib in late 1985 to 1986 on Univac and Unix in C with many other X libraries written in Common Lisp.<p>X10R3 mostly stabilized the Xlib around a few platforms and CPU architecture (DDX) in a"long" preparation for X11R1 in September 1987.<p><a href="https://www.x.org/wiki/X11R1/?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.x.org/wiki/X11R1/?utm_source=chatgpt.com</a>
Since this was a 2nd hand machine having the upgrades for X11 doesn't seem unlikely.
400 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.<p>Another rationale may have been that the flywheel on the motor-generator would cover a multitude of power-quality sins.
Hello Bandit!
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).<p>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.
The 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.<p>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.
> a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine.<p>Unsurprisingly, I would say, the Cray is literally the prime example in "A Gallery of Computers as Furniture".[†]<p>[†] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601097">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601097</a>
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
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.<p>That’s 20 years or about 10,000X the available VLSI transistors via Moore’s Law.
Seymour Cray never designed a silicon microprocessor. I wonder what he would have created had that opportunity presented itself.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray</a>
> The CRAY-1 was so ridiculously ahead of its time that it took until the Pentium MMX ...<p>You'd need a different comparison to show how the Cray-1 was special. If the comparison is to single commodity CPUs, like the Pentium MMX, you could make much the same comparison for many mainframes and supercomputers. Several supercomputers in the 1980s exceeded 1 GFLOP, for example, and it wasn't until the 2000s that you could get commodity CPUs with that performance.
I wonder how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is?<p>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!<p>Sadly I don’t think we will ever see Warp Drives, Time Travel or World Peace. But we might get Jet Packs!
Recently I've found myself wanting a tricorder type device.
With the visual analysis of LLMs, throw in some extra ingredients with a camera, microphone, speaker, and display, and were getting close. Add Bluetooth for biosensors and... Iterate a couple of generations...<p>We're getting there!
From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1:<p>"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance<p>...<p>By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."
At 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.
>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is..<p>Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you.<p>Bet that was not include in your sci-fi dreams in 70s..
Oh but we had The Forbin Project, its sequel Colossus, and later Wargames. Not to mention Star Trek episodes with malignant computers. And I have No Mouth But I Must Scream.<p>In the 70s, science fiction fed me Cold War fears of world-controlling mainframes.
I'd love to see you substantiate that - bet you can't.
Not terribly impressive considering an average 20 year old super computer c. 2005 is still about 100x as fast as today's best consumer cpus
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.<p>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.
Blew my mind age 4. Then found out about the imos transputer. And robotics magazine. 70's were popping. Ponging?
XMOS is still keeping the Inmos dream alive, more or less!
Inmos 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.
My first time on Cray, I thought I had a core dump, my program ended so quickly. No, the job had finished.
> 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 <a href="https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6600.thornton.design_of_a_computer_the_control_data_6600.1970.102630394.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6...</a><p>i don't think there is a comparable book about the cray-1?
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???"
I quickly skimmed the instruction set and did not see anything resembling a sub-routine call or branch and link instruction.<p>Did I miss it?
The "R exp" is subroutine call (which saves return address to register B00), and I believe "J Bjk" is the subroutine return.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Gemini explains this as being to help pipelining.
Subroutine calls are for the weak :)<p>There's some more detail here: <a href="https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM.html" rel="nofollow">https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM...</a><p>The following quote gives some sense of how "manual" this was:<p>> "On execution of the return jump instruction (007), register Boo is set to the next instruction parcel address (P) and a branch to an address specified by ijkm occurs. Upon receiving control, the called routine will conventionally save (Boo) so that the Boo register will be free for the called routine to initiate return jumps of its own. When a called routine wishes to return to its caller, it restores the saved address and executes a 005 instruction. This instruction, which is a branch to (Bjk), causes the address saved in Bjk to be entered into P as the address of the next instruction parcel to be executed."<p>Details were up to the compiler that produced the machine code.
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.
Absolutely 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.
> "The compact mainframe occupies a <i>MERE</i> 70 sq. ft. of floor space."<p>(emphasis mine)
Am I right in thinking there are no working Cray-1s?<p>I know a couple of museums have them, but I don't think any software has ever surfaced, am I right?
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.
I 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.<p>In my back pocket. To watch cat videos.
I remember computer magazines of the time talking about "a Cray on a chip" in their April 1st jokes.<p>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.<p>In one lifetime.
Cray 1 - 160 MFLOPS<p>M4 CPU - 280 GFLOPS<p>M4 GPU - 2900 GFLOPS
> I'd love to do an order of magnitude comparison to a modern M4 Mac... Amazing how far we've come.<p>Yes, would be nice to compare the capabilities (multiuser, multitasking, security, RCE).
Did we get _so_ far ?
How many users can a Mac sustain ?
Why the thin black curtain on the window?<p>Thoughts:<p>1. To block some sunlight from getting in.<p>2. It’s a secure facility and wanted to prevent people from looking in.<p>3. To not have to look at something outside.<p>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 suspect the curtains are closed to avoid causing exposure issues etc. in the photos being taken.<p>As for windows in a computer room, seems a bit unusual, but a nicer working environment than the usual windowless box I'd guess...
Many 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.<p>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.
It was the 70s, and that was simply the style at the time.
Or, you know: Sometimes, a window shade is just a window shade.
who was the industrial designer? Cray-1 fits so well it looks straight out of 2001: A space Odyssey
somewhat related:<p><i>"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.</i><p><a href="https://cray-history.net/2021/07/16/apple-computer-and-cray-research-some-notes/" rel="nofollow">https://cray-history.net/2021/07/16/apple-computer-and-cray-...</a>
Cray 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.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ</a>
In 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.
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.<p>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.)
Documentation is fantastic.
I had the cover of this pinned up on my wall! Supercomputer porn.
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