Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi • Hacker News Board

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#61

Post by shagie » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:00 AM UTC

zoky wrote: post #55

shagie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite machines from Top500 is SystemX. https://www.top500.org/system/173736/ When it was commissioned in 2004, this array of 1100x Apple PowerPC 970 systems was the 7th most powerful computer on the list. It's Linpack Performance was 12,250.00 GFlop/s.

You forgot the best part: It was colloquially referred to as the “Big Mac”.

First capture - https://web.archive.org/web/20040724145729/http://www.tcf.vt...

Last capture - https://web.archive.org/web/20070606024231/http://www.tcf.vt...

An FAQ from somewhere in the middle - https://web.archive.org/web/20060708113430/http://www.tcf.vt...

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#62

Post by Dork1234 » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:02 AM UTC

boznz wrote: post #53

This is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.

You can always replace them with RP2040 which have integer performance similar to the Cray-1 if that makes you feel better.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#63

Post by niederman » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

avg_dev wrote: post #56

qgin wrote: post #52

It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.

such a dystopian future... I hope we are not still using plastic then :)

How is this dystopian? Plastic is a really great material -- and way more eco-friendly than metal for building computers. It's only mass-produced single-use plastics like water bottles that are bad for the environment.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#64

Post by xcv123 » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

blackoil wrote: post #35

Is there any software apart from benchmarks that will make it feel that fast. All softwares that I use feel more advanced version of things that I ran on my 386. GUI, IDE, compiler, office... I understand that the exercise may still be theoretical as any sw used by Met now will be designed for million time fast computers. But there should exist some software that would have required Cray to run then.

No. The Cray-1 ran batch processing jobs, mostly scientific simulations which took hours or days to compute. It had a terminal interface and wasn't used for real time interactive applications.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#65

Post by pklausler » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:09 AM UTC

stevenjgarner wrote: post #17

amelius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

COS supported time-sharing and multiple users quite well, actually, including interactive sessions.

Trivia: Seymour was user U0100 on our in-house systems.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#66

Post by Animats » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #42

The Cray-1 has a much better couch.

The Cray-1's padded seats cover the power supplies. I was sad to see the Cray-1 at the Computer Museum in Mountain View being used as storage for catering supplies for some event in the lobby.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#67

Post by upon_drumhead » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:25 AM UTC

boznz wrote: post #53

This is actually quite depressing considering the amount of Raspberry pi's doing tasks like watering a plant, Reminds me of Marvin the paranoid android.

Esp32 ( https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 ) are what most folks should be using to do that stuff. It’s a great platform to build upon.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#68

Post by yummypaint » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:29 AM UTC

blackoil wrote: post #35

Is there any software apart from benchmarks that will make it feel that fast. All softwares that I use feel more advanced version of things that I ran on my 386. GUI, IDE, compiler, office... I understand that the exercise may still be theoretical as any sw used by Met now will be designed for million time fast computers. But there should exist some software that would have required Cray to run then.

The best bet might be an old physics code written in fortran. Maybe calculation of scattering cross sections from matrix elements or something with alot of vectorizable linear algebra.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#69

Post by bboygravity » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:32 AM UTC

tonymet wrote: post #58

whitej125 wrote: post #32

Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”

Have you seen houses from the 1920s -- she's not that far off

Have you seen (tiny) houses in 2023s (large cities) -- she's not that far off.

Re: Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

#70

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 4:39 AM UTC

qgin wrote: post #52

It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.

Didn’t the Apollo guidance computer, which took people to the moon, have 4K of RAM? Today, 1 million times that barely runs the OS and a few Chrome tabs.