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

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

#91

Post by FarmerPotato »

drfuchs wrote: post #89
FarmerPotato wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh. Well the sequel in print was named Colossus. It is about continuing life under the reign of supercomputer.

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

#92

Post by commandlinefan »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #78
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?

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.

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

#95

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 should add, the o200 was a 4u chassis with a desk side skin option.

If you popped off the plastic and had rails you could convert them.

The o200 had stonith (shoot the other node in the head) ports like the o2000 for clustering etc..

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

#96

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

commandlinefan wrote: post #92
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

This Cray version isn't so bad - it just requires that if the callee itself calls other subroutines, then it has to save/restore this B00 return address register. You could still support re-entrant routines with this as long as you saved/restored the return address to a software stack rather than a fixed location, but I wonder if Cray compilers typically supported that?

Apparently the reason for using a register vs stack for return address was because memory access (stack) was so much slower.

I'm kinda tempted to use this for the VM I'm designing, which will run on the 6502 8-bit micro. The 6502 doesn't have any 16-bit operations, so pushing and popping using a software defined 16-bit stack pointer is slow, and saving return address to zero page would certainly be faster. It'd mean that rather than always pushing/popping the SP, you only do it in the callee if needed. It's an interesting idea!

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

#97

Post by Grosvenor »

nyrikki wrote: post #88
Grosvenor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

I'm tugging at my memory with this page: http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/index.html

I had a teal Indigo2, an O2, and an Indy at various points. Neat stuff, but time moves on.

There's some complex setups listed in the origin/onyx pages. You could mostly mix and match boards to get what you wanted.

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

#99

Post by ggm »

xattt wrote: post #60
Polizeiposaune wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cray-1 or Cray-2? IIRC Fluorinert was new with the Cray-2, while wikipedia suggests that the Cray-1 used a freon as coolant.

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.

It was fat finger memory. it was X10R3 or something similar, which I had previously used in UCL on Ultrix machines in the 80s. I don't think it was R5, I don't think much got upgraded in that space but .. it was a long time ago.

This was a SECOND HAND cray. It was a tax contra made in the 90s when Boeing sold a lot of stuff to the Australian Defence forces, and to avoid a massive tax burden donated science trash to the uni.

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

#100

Post by drpixie »

5- wrote: post #32

for 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.
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