I 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.
The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
101–110 of 111 posts
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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!
From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1: "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 ... 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…
These flops are not the same. The 2013 phone flops are fp32, the A13 flops look to be fp32 as well (not entirely sure), while the Cray numbers (like the rest of the HPC industry) are fp64 (Cray 1 predates what would become IEEE 754 binary64 though, so not same exact arithmetic but similar in dynamic range and precision).
A modern Nvidia GB200 only does about 40 tflop/s in fp64 for instance. You can emulate higher precision/dynamic range arithmetic with multiple passes and manipulations of lower precision/dynamic range arithmetic but without an insane number of instructions it won't meet all the IEEE 754 guarantees for instance.
Certainly if Nvidia wanted to dedicate much more chip area to fp64 they could get a lot higher, but fp64 FMA units alone would be likely >30 times larger than their fp16 cousins and probably 100s of times larger than fp4 versions.
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#103I 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 hi…
I 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.
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It ensures the Cray is placed as the centerpiece of the room, not as mere equipment shoved on the wall
Probably they could achieve the same with circular construction but without the seats.
They 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?
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "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 hob…
I 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.
Cray's design for Control Data before starting his own company was interesting. You were required to start each subroutine with a jump instruction, and the subroutine call instruction would modify the memory at that location to a jump back to the caller. To return from a subroutine you would just branch back to its beginning.
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#106Am 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?
The cooling fluids have been illegal to manufacture for a very long time. I wonder if there's still enough left in the world to keep one running?
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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... We're getting there!
So...a cell phone?
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#108for a much more in-depth description of its predecessor, see https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/CDC/cdc.6... i don't think there is a comparable book about the cray-1?
There are several versions of the Cray 1 Hardware Reference manual online. They're not as descriptive as Design of a Computer, but still informative.
thank you! that is very informative.
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. 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. X10R3 mostly stabilized the Xlib around a few platforms and CPU architecture (DDX) in a"long…
Thank you. I didn’t realize that progress was still being made for Cray-1 machines a decade later.
Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]
#110Before 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 o…
The 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.