

Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1 - henning
http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/08/29/finally-finished/

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spitfire
It's such s shame software isn't available. The cray-1, like the colossus are
important parts of world history.

I'm more than a little jelous that this guy made this and not me. Oh well,
some day I'll own an old altix.

* HN should have more of this, less ify/.ly dotcoms.

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jyothi
<http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/> The detail article with
architecture & photos from the building process.

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alain94040
Nice. It's an FPGA board, the Verilog source code for the processor is
available. 80 MHz, plenty of vector registers, fits inside one modern FPGA...

Downside: the author couldn't locate any software for Cray yet. Looks like he
looked pretty hard and still came up empty. Anyone can help?

~~~
_delirium
I suppose I'd probably read it somewhere, but it reminds me what a huge gap
there used to be between supercomputers and anything else in raw horsepower.
80 MHz in 1976! Workstation-class machines only achieved those clock speeds
around 1991-92, and the Pentium hit that speed in 1994. Not directly
comparable (very different architectures), but still I think a bigger gap than
currently exists between top-end consumer equipment and top-end big iron when
you look at single CPUs (big iron of course scales up to much higher
multiprocessing).

~~~
jedbrown
It hasn't been fair to compare single-CPU performance in a long time, machines
on the top500 either use commodity x86-64 chips, or (BlueGene) much slower
chips with good memory and power efficiency (NEC is a notable exception). But
it's worth noting that supercomputer performance consistently outpaces Moore's
Law (<http://59A2.org/na-slides/Keyes-PetaflopsSeriously-2008.pdf>).

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wazoox
The X-MP will be a tougher nut to crack, but I think the software may be
easier to find.

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viraptor
Well - at least one fact can be confirmed now - Cray does scale :) (-down,
mostly)

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js4all
This is fantastic.

