A Cray-1 supercomputer replica from 30 "obsolete" Mac Minis

22 points by pseudolus1 day ago

5 comments

TrevorFSmith26 minutes ago
I know it's pedantic but this is a tribute or a re-envisioning but it's not a replica.
ginko31 minutes ago
>The Cray-1 team hopes to fill the currently empty second half of the tower through a crowdfunding campaign to secure 70–80 additional M4 Mac Minis. The goal: create a cluster capable of ranking on the TOP500 supercomputers list.Is ~100 Mac Minis really all it takes to get into the TOP500 these days?
- mat_epice2 minutes ago
 Pretty sure not, especially since it requires 64-bit floating-point, so the GPU cores don't help. #500 right now is 2PF. One Mac won't do anywhere near 20 TF. Google tells me you can get 350GF of DP from one 10-core M4, so you might need 10,000 to get there. Then there's the network...
- gs1710 minutes ago
 I don't think so, the lowest from 2026 was still 2.66 PFlop/s, so they'd need thousands of Mac Minis.
ck25 minutes ago
imagine showing even the first iphone to a Cray engineer in 1976they'd lose their minds lol(Cray-1 was 160 megaflops, smartphones are teraflops)
mrlonglong9 hours ago
They could rent out all that compute to subsidy the museum running costs.
- eric__cartman1 hour ago
 I doubt distributed compute in a bunch of old i7s is worth much once you factor in the electricity cost
- bigyabai1 hour ago
 The RAM shortage is bad, but not that bad (yet).
latchkey42 minutes ago
The picture with all the cables everywhere... ugh that sets off my OCD.