The RPi, unlike the Cray-1, does not offer ample sitting space.
Somebody made a Cray-themed Pi Zero cluster which perhaps fits the bill (if you’re a mouse, that is): https://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html
Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
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Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#12The author's CV is as interesting as the benchmarks
link?
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#13"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1" edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.
I’m more impressed that the cray was that fast such a long time ago tbh
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#14Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#15"In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1" edit: thank you for the Christmas present, yc algorithm. God bless us every one.
I’m more impressed that the cray was that fast such a long time ago tbh
It was even faster in practice because the software was less bloated.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#16The RPi, unlike the Cray-1, does not offer ample sitting space.
Nor does it have quite the panache in its spartan design.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m more impressed that the cray was that fast such a long time ago tbh
It was even faster in practice because the software was less bloated.
The primary operating system for the Cray-1 was the Cray Operating System (COS), which was a batch processing system. COS was specifically designed to exploit the hardware capabilities of the Cray-1, focusing on high-speed computation rather than on features like multi-user support. Given its focus on scientific and mathematical computations, COS supported compilers for languages like FORTRAN, which was the dominant language for scientific computing at the time. The Cray FORTRAN Compiler was highly optimized to take advantage of the Cray-1's vector processing capabilities. There was also a set of mathematical libraries optimized for its architecture. These libraries included routines for linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and other mathematical operations critical in scientific computing.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#18It'd make more sense to compare with a RISC-V that has Vector 1.0. Because a vector machine is what it was.
Well, or compare to a GPU or a TPU
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#19There's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system . Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.
The lack of I/O to the cpu might be the counterpoint to this. A single (exposed) PCIe lane might be enough for any singular task, but you're likely to start bogging down your bandwidth if you need to do any serious simultaneous tasks like network above a gbit, nvme disk IO, additional display or additional parallel computing like a GPU.
Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
#20I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen.
"I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?"
"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"
Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.