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The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

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Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#81

Post by nyrikki »

Grosvenor wrote: post #76
FarmerPotato wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You means SGI onyx? The cool looking purple one?

IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#82

Post by Grosvenor »

nyrikki wrote: post #81
Grosvenor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You means SGI onyx? The cool looking purple one?

IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)

So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems.

Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#83

Post by nyrikki »

Grosvenor wrote: post #82
nyrikki wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)

So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems. Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

It must have been more complex then that, I was at the skywalker ranch when onyx was being replaced by o200/2000 and never saw a purple onyx at Kerner(ILM), I had a purple Indy impact as my home machine and was looking for purple. I hated teal with a passion.

Perhaps all the purple rack onyx had been dumped but we dug through ILMs boneyard looking to add to our cxfs cluster, but the FC bus speed was too low.

It is possible that R10k was different or that there were multiple chassis. The desk sides I had experience with required RAM in slot 1, with CPU in slot 2, with up to 4 CPUs on the board.

o200 was more restrictive, with 2 CPUs per chassis, with the ability to cray-link two chassis for a total of 4 CPUs, more required o2000.

But this was a quarter of a century ago or more by now…so I may misremember things.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#84

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

effnorwood wrote: post #5

Blew my mind age 4. Then found out about the imos transputer. And robotics magazine. 70's were popping. Ponging?

The Transputer was ahead of it's time, maybe due to anticipating the end of Moore's law a bit too early!

The Transputer's inter-chip channel connections remind a bit of Nvidia's NVLink or AMD's Infinity Fabric.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#85

Post by Grosvenor »

nyrikki wrote: post #83
Grosvenor wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems. Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

It must have been more complex then that, I was at the skywalker ranch when onyx was being replaced by o200/2000 and never saw a purple onyx at Kerner(ILM), I had a purple Indy impact as my home machine and was looking for purple. I hated teal with a passion. Perhaps all the purple rack onyx had been dumped but we dug through ILMs boneyard looking to add to our cxfs cluster, but the FC bus speed was too low. It is po…

Oh I think you may be right here. I was thinking originally 2000/onyx 2 which were basically the same system just with or without graphics pipes.

And you’re right origin had three models (maybe more) a tower system (o200), a deskside system (same as onyx2) and a rack (same as onyx2).

For Indy impact so you mean the teal/purple indigo2? Weirdly the teal desktop was named indigo2..

Weird but cool stuff.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#86

Post by FarmerPotato »

antonvs wrote: post #79
lebuffon wrote: post #74

I quickly skimmed the instruction set and did not see anything resembling a sub-routine call or branch and link instruction. Did I miss it?

Subroutine calls are for the weak :) There's some more detail here: https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM... The following quote gives some sense of how "manual" this was: > "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 convent…

Essentially, the B00 register is a Top Of (Return) Stack or TOS register. It’s great for leaf routines.

You have to push it to your preferred stack before the next operation. You do the cycle-counting to decide if it’s a good ISA for your implementation, or not.

Obviously, ISAs with a JSR that pushes to stack are always using an extra ALU cycle for the SP math, then a memory write.

Doing it with a (maybe costless) register transfer followed by (only sometimes) a stack PUSH can work out to the same number of cycles.

With improvements in memory speed or CPU speed, that decision can flip.

Consider that in this era, your ALU also had the job of incrementing the PC during an idle pipeline stage (maybe the instruction decode). Doing a SP increment for a PUSH might compete with that, so separating the two might make the pipeline more uniform. I don’t know any of the Cray ISAs so this is just a guess.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#87

Post by AKluge »

I was a heavy user of the Cray-1, Cray-XMP and Cray-2 at the magnetic fusion computing center at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. One of the important things to remember was that the Crays of this generation were vector processors, that is they carried out operations across multiple elements of arrays at once. If you didn't structure your code properly, you didn't see these extraordinarily high instruction rates.

And, yes, quite some time ago I noticed that my cell phone had surpassed the capabilities of these early Crays :)

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#88

Post by nyrikki »

Grosvenor wrote: post #85
nyrikki wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must have been more complex then that, I was at the skywalker ranch when onyx was being replaced by o200/2000 and never saw a purple onyx at Kerner(ILM), I had a purple Indy impact as my home machine and was looking for purple. I hated teal with a passion. Perhaps all the purple rack onyx had been dumped but we dug through ILMs boneyard looking to add to our cxfs cluster, but the FC bus speed was too low. It is po…

Oh I think you may be right here. I was thinking originally 2000/onyx 2 which were basically the same system just with or without graphics pipes. And you’re right origin had three models (maybe more) a tower system (o200), a deskside system (same as onyx2) and a rack (same as onyx2). For Indy impact so you mean the teal/purple indigo2? Weirdly the teal desktop was named indigo2.. Weird but cool stuff.

I actually forgot that they made a low end ‘Indy’ and never saw one. We called the Indigo2 Indy

There were some oddities with ad dollars and prestige clients in the 90s, where systems would be upgraded, avoiding swapping out the serialized, asset tagged parts, yet upgrading systems.

The teal Indigo2s were the original with the impact graphics ones being purple.

But all the Indigo2s I saw typically were r10k + max impact graphics despite the color.

The cases were identical.

But Evans & Sutherland and Lucas are the only places I dealt with SGI, so probably not a good source for typical customer’s experience

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#89

Post by drfuchs »

FarmerPotato wrote: post #31
qsera wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how many times faster my iPhone 17 Pro Max is.. Sadly most of that power is not working for you, most of the time, but working against you, by spying, tracking and manipulating you. 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. In the 70s, science fiction fed me Cold War fears of world-controlling mainframes.

Colossus: The Forbin Project is simply a renamed release of The Forbin Project, a few months after the later had a poor opening. Didn’t help the box office much. I liked it, back when it was easy to dismiss as an impossible dystopia.

Re: The Cray-1 Computer System (1977) [pdf]

#90

Post by FarmerPotato »

Grosvenor wrote: post #82
nyrikki wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the desk side onyx had the royal purple stripes and only accepted one CPU board, the rack mount version were that blue-purple color, more indigo (color)

So there were two computers made with the same bits mid 90s. Origin(compute, blue) and onyx(graphics, purple). Both had deskside and rack systems. Onyx had a few slots reserved for graphics, original could have more compute boards. But you could certainly put two couple cpu boards in an onyx deskside or rack.

Uhoh, I think I mistook Oxygen for Origin. It was 25 years ago.

The funny thing was that our Cray sales team, from the C90 and T3D, jumped ship from Cray to SGI before their merger.

So got to set up some Indys as web servers/ Oracle database. Surprise! Same sales team. Then the merger happened and we got the Origin boxes.

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