
The search for the lost Cray supercomputer OS - bane
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/14/the-search-for-the-lost-cray-supercomputer-os/
======
mmastrac
Couldn't find a link to the project in the article, so here you go:

[http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-
cray-1a/](http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/)

Also, gigaom has a much better article up here:

[http://gigaom.com/2014/01/14/the-search-for-the-lost-cray-
su...](http://gigaom.com/2014/01/14/the-search-for-the-lost-cray-
supercomputer-os/)

.. with a link to an interesting walkthough of the emulator in-progress:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D6R8F...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D6R8FOANclc)

~~~
mietek
> ...apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning
> them off again in the late 90′s.

Why would anyone do this?

~~~
beat
Maybe the Pentagon asked them to do so?

------
greenyoda
" _Seymour Cray 's first computer, the Cray 1, debuted in 1976_"

No, that was _Cray Research 's_ first computer. Seymour Cray was designing
computers for Control Data Corporation long before that: the CDC 1604 (in
1960); the CDC 3000 series; the CDC 6600 (the first commercial supercomputer)
and its successors.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray)

------
beat
I used to work under a former Cray engineer who wrote the linker for UNICOS
(Cray Unix). He was instructed by the architects to write a single-pass linker
for $some_theoretical_reason, but he did what he felt was right and wrote a
double-pass linker instead. Customers later praised the stability and
usefulness of the UNICOS linker relative to its competitors at the time, so he
felt validated.

From him, I learned the phrase "It's better to ask for forgiveness than
permission". Still my favorite manager ever, and one of the reasons I believe
mentoring is so important in our industry.

(I actually worked with a lot of former Cray engineers in the late 1990s.
Brilliant, all of them. I learned a lot.)

~~~
guelo
was there more than one OS or is this UNICOS what they're trying to get
running?

~~~
ams6110
No the Cray OS would have preceded UNICOS.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Operating_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Operating_System)

Also some customers developed their own operating systems.

Note that systems like this also required a separate management computer to
boot the mainframe and load the OS.

------
fintler
We still have our Cray-1 (with serial number #001 in the Bradbury). If someone
is really serious about doing novel research, I can probably pass along your
name to the folks who can give you access (after they approve a proposal).

Here's a picture of it that you probably haven't seen before (in this
resolution anyway):
[http://i.imgur.com/OHqUfmk.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/OHqUfmk.jpg)

~~~
frik
Great! Is it still in operation mode, or only a museum piece? I found an
article that may be related (also Bradbury) and they call it "true museum
piece": [http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57411871-1/crave-
visits-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57411871-1/crave-visits-the-
cray-1-a-true-museum-piece/)

I read on Wikipedia that e.g. NCAR turned off their Cray-1 in 1988. Though it
would be really cool if there is still a Cray-1 in an useable state.

I stood next to Cray-1, Cray X-MP and Cray-2 supercomputers in museums in
Europe (London, Munich). The unique cooling system that also acts as bench was
a nice idea. And the second one was submerged in an (special) oil tank.

~~~
fintler
Yep, that article described the one I'm talking about. It's behind glass in a
museum showroom now (about a mile from where I'm sitting at the moment), but
it's in very good shape. I wouldn't be surprised if it still works.

------
sanxiyn
According to ESR: "Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers,
was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating
system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-
panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked."

[http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-
history...](http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/)

------
ttflee
Have they tried to ask the Chinese scientists? I heard rumors that the Yinhe
(银河, the Milky Way in Chinese) I supercomputer was kinda `compatible' with
Cray I.

[http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=nmz5nDJAYGMC&pg=PA21&lpg...](http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=nmz5nDJAYGMC&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=yinhe+cray&source=bl&ots=WZXiQ021bX&sig=JS4bFTNxHGoG7j80AWpE2hI7BVg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jGrXUoCrHsbsiAeTkYCICA&redir_esc=y&hl=zh-
CN&sourceid=cndr#v=onepage&q=yinhe%20cray&f=false)

EDIT:

Yinhe-I

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FCZ3U_VuvpU/TKQ8UA0bFXI/AAAAAAAABd...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FCZ3U_VuvpU/TKQ8UA0bFXI/AAAAAAAABdI/Ie4J7BhJRks/s400/1253881087wXAObbaO.jpg)

Cray-I

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FCZ3U_VuvpU/TKQ9BamNTFI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FCZ3U_VuvpU/TKQ9BamNTFI/AAAAAAAABdQ/KXM-
ySGoxb4/s400/scray.jpg)

~~~
eru
> [...] kinda `compatible' [...]

Probably used `metric inches', like in the Soviet Union? (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_inch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_inch))

~~~
ttflee
Although I have never seen either of the two, I have heard rumors that people
claimed that the Yinhe-I was actually cloned Cray-I. Considering that the
subtle equilibrium among north east Asian countries, the Soviet and the U.S.
during the Cold War and that China was used by the U.S. as leverage to
neutualize the influence of the Soviet, after Richard Nixon's visit, and
before the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, maybe the Chinese clones
were even closer to the genuine ones than the Soviet Bloc computer systems.

------
ck2
I don't think it's finished until we can run the Cray OS in javascript in our
browser.

1000 times faster than the original.

It is not only the computing advances that are amazing, those "seats" around
the Cray are actually the power supply!

~~~
4ad
A Cray-1 does 80MFLOPS. 80GFLOPS is around what a current i7 CPU can do. You
can't emulate a 80GFLOPS machine in javascript right now. A Cray X-MP is
800MFLOPS and a Cray 2 is 1.9GFLOPS. These are not PDP-11s we're talking about
here.

Bellard's x86 js emulator, which is as good as it can get, has a performance
comparable with a 486. A 486 is slower than a Cray 1. It seems that even today
you can't emulate a cray in the browser at native speed, nothing can come
close to that 1000 times faster idea.

Please also remember that these system had massive memory bandwidth, and
supported non-sequential workloads better than current computers which rely a
lot on caches. Even if you can get the emulated peak performance of Cray 1 in
javascript, for real tasks that this computers was used for it would be
slower.

~~~
beat
The memory architecture is a very good point. It's fundamentally different
from the x86-derived systems we all use today.

Besides, if you really want to emulate a Cray, it's not the OS that's
important so much as that almighty FORTRAN compiler! Part of the fun of
working with old Cray guys was listening to the ranting about how FORTRAN is
the Best Language Ever and that by removing a layer of memory indirection,
it's faster than even C. Of course, you're then hardcoding the living crap out
of everything, but that was handwaved away as a minor price to be paid for
real performance....

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Was anyone interested in forth on the cray too?

~~~
4ad
No idea, but my understanding of the architecture is that it wouldn't work
well.

------
Nanzikambe

      “For these machines (Cray-1 or X-MP) you couldn’t really go into a store 
      and buy an application, like you do for a PC these days. Now, you just
      ‘install’ Word and it runs. For these machines, everything came in 
      source-code format and you needed to compile it before you could run 
      it. You use the … compiler to turn it into machine code the machine 
      could understand,” Tantos said. “That was the main way you interacted with 
      these machines. Without the compiler, you can’t feed it that.”
    

And at last, we have located Gentoo's antecedent!

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Gentoo's antecedent was freebsd ports. Hence the name portage.

~~~
Nanzikambe
Indeed. I'm a Gentoo user and contributor since late 2002 :) I suspect I
should've surrounded my post in <JOKE> </JOKE> tags, I wasn't actually
suggesting one is anyway descendant from the other.

It is fascinating to see how far back the methodology goes though, I wasn't
aware of this.

------
ChickeNES
I once tried to track down the original source of NeXTStep when I was working
on adding NeXT black hardware support to QEMU, but had no real idea who to
ask/where to look. I know it was sold at a hefty price back in the day, but I
have no idea if anyone actually purchased a copy.

~~~
chiph
You probably just need to find the right person at Apple.

------
frik
A very good book about this topic:

The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the
Supercomputer

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Supermen-Seymour-Technical-
Superco...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Supermen-Seymour-Technical-
Supercomputer/dp/0471048852/)

It's a great book about Seymour Cray (biography) that details all his work. He
was one of the very best, a real hero. Sadly he died in a car accident in the
nineties.

------
justincormack
Always fond of the story that Steve Jobs used a Cray to design Apple computers
while Cray used an Apple to design the Cray [1]

[1]
[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AppleCrayComputer](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AppleCrayComputer)

~~~
frik
Yes and sadly:

Seymour Cray, the supercomputer architect, died of head and neck injuries
suffered in a traffic collision in 1996. His vehicle — a Jeep Cherokee — was
designed using a Cray supercomputer.

[source: "The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards
Behind the Supercomputer" book]

------
Ologn
The thing I remember about Unicos was that it was fanatical about job
prioritization, which processes had permissions to use processor cpu time etc.
You had to jump through hoops to get things running, even for commands that
would run for less than a minute on a less robust system.

------
allochthon
I'm waiting for the JavaScript emulator, which I assume will run faster than
the original Cray 1.

------
protomyth
submitted the same article 1 day ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7058448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7058448)

[I wonder about the filters - this submission has some discussion to it]

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Yeah, seems like they nerfed the submission filter today. A TCL story was 2nd,
for example.

------
joe_the_user
Fascinating project, amazing to see what can be done with still incomplete
hardware and software.

Odd that only hobbyists seem to be involved with this.

Google for "museum of computing", I find a multitude of institutions. What
else would they do but something like this?

~~~
nl
Most computing museums are run by hobbyists.

Larger museums are only interested in famous milestone computers (The Apple
II, Commodore 64 etc).

