I spent the weekend vibecoding software for the Cray 1.
I installed the open source Cray Simulator on my "Le Potato" SBC, then installed UNICOS, then tasks Gemini with writing a weather forecasting program that ingests raw data from METAR weather stations and uses the simulator's vector processor to generate the forecast. It renders a nice little weather dashboard viewable in the terminal. A python http service runs outside the Cray and serves up a nice little web page with a virtual terminal that displays the dashboard.
Is it useful? No...but it's cool as hell. I plan to print up an enclosure for it along with a mini terminal with a 4" LCD to display the live dashboard. Then I'll have a nice little baby Cray to put on the shelf in my gameroom.
My little tribute to one of the first deployments of a Cray at NCAR.
>The Cray-1 team hopes to fill the currently empty second half of the tower through a crowdfunding campaign to secure 70–80 additional M4 Mac Minis. The goal: create a cluster capable of ranking on the TOP500 supercomputers list.
Is ~100 Mac Minis really all it takes to get into the TOP500 these days?
I don't think so, the lowest from 2026 was still 2.66 PFlop/s, so they'd need thousands of Mac Minis. The M4s in the Minis aren't on a different level than the Xeons in those old clusters (outside of power consumption), even if we let the Macs use FP32.
Pretty sure not, especially since it requires 64-bit floating-point, so the GPU cores don't help. #500 right now is 2PF. One Mac won't do anywhere near 20 TF. Google tells me you can get 350GF of DP from one 10-core M4, so you might need 10,000 to get there. Then there's the network...
“In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.” This refers to official average geometric mean results.
Reading Jurrasic Park, it as bit of fun hearing of how the island purchased multiple Cray super computer to help with genetic research.
Fun even if its a bit of fiction.
Can it run Cray-1 software? The architecture is completely different. I coudn't get that from the article. It seems like a large cluster of Macs arranged superficially to look like a Cray-1.
I imagine that they could run that on top of them and run official Cray software. The instructions are for Linux/Windows, but I bet it runs in homebrew just fine.
I spent the weekend setting up the open source Cray simulator on a really cheap SBC then vibecoding a weath forecasting application that uses the Cray's vector processor to process raw weather data.
Mine is a lot smaller, but it can run Cray workloads at full speed.
Rather than rent it out (maybe some people would pay a few bucks a year for novelty web/mail hosting, but it's both too much and too little for most use cases, running the program of renting it probably eats up a lot of the revenue), maybe they could give compute time to universities for free, with the requirement that they provide some sort of display for museum visitors? There's probably some people with Monte Carlo simulations that could benefit from a lot of cores (if they get the M4 upgrade) while being on a student budget of $0. And if no one has requested it, they could run some BOINC project that has a nice visualization.
The Cray-1 was measured on 64-bit FLOPS, so you would have to do apples-to-apples (heh). A modern iPhone can do 300 GF of 64-bit, so only 2000x.
The iPhone 4 was probably the first that could beat a Cray-1, and it was by a narrow margin. However, that was only a 32-bit chip. The next year iPhones went 64-bit, and it was all over.
I phrase this to my kids in a different way, but same exact sentiment: The only limit these days is a modest amount of resources and the ideas in your head.
ie. Feature film? Sure. Music album, sure. Your own electronics project designed at the kitchen table, ordered from china, housings printed on the 3d printer -- all from the table.
It is an absolutely astoundingly low bar of entry these days to almost anything you'd like to create or build.
If you were an engineer working on this machine, it was visually clear to you that the modularity took up the majority of the space. The ICs themselves were already pretty dense.
Pace of computer power increase was huge even back then, so imagining something like a powerful pocket computer was quite an easy thing to do.
I can easily imagine that these engineers would be disappointed by the first iPhone because, by interpolation, they expected something like that by the early 1990's.
I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.
I know it's pedantic but this is a tribute or a re-envisioning but it's not a replica.
Well I was tricked so I think it's better to be accurate.
I spent the weekend vibecoding software for the Cray 1.
I installed the open source Cray Simulator on my "Le Potato" SBC, then installed UNICOS, then tasks Gemini with writing a weather forecasting program that ingests raw data from METAR weather stations and uses the simulator's vector processor to generate the forecast. It renders a nice little weather dashboard viewable in the terminal. A python http service runs outside the Cray and serves up a nice little web page with a virtual terminal that displays the dashboard.
Is it useful? No...but it's cool as hell. I plan to print up an enclosure for it along with a mini terminal with a 4" LCD to display the live dashboard. Then I'll have a nice little baby Cray to put on the shelf in my gameroom.
My little tribute to one of the first deployments of a Cray at NCAR.
>The Cray-1 team hopes to fill the currently empty second half of the tower through a crowdfunding campaign to secure 70–80 additional M4 Mac Minis. The goal: create a cluster capable of ranking on the TOP500 supercomputers list.
Is ~100 Mac Minis really all it takes to get into the TOP500 these days?
I don't think so, the lowest from 2026 was still 2.66 PFlop/s, so they'd need thousands of Mac Minis. The M4s in the Minis aren't on a different level than the Xeons in those old clusters (outside of power consumption), even if we let the Macs use FP32.
Pretty sure not, especially since it requires 64-bit floating-point, so the GPU cores don't help. #500 right now is 2PF. One Mac won't do anywhere near 20 TF. Google tells me you can get 350GF of DP from one 10-core M4, so you might need 10,000 to get there. Then there's the network...
It would likely take a few more...
but for some history fun: https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2003/11/
#3 on the list was "X" https://www.top500.org/system/173225/
Virginia Tech, self made 2,200 core PowerPC 970 as 1100 G5 Macs with Rmax at 10,280.00 GFlops (this is 0.012 PFlops).
... and for some more history about the Cray vs modern computers... http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
Back to TOP500... the 500th spot in June 2026: https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2026/06/?page=5 is https://www.top500.org/system/179890/It debuted in 2020 at #130 with Max at 2.66 PFlops.
A M4Pro mini today benches at 8.520 TFlops https://www.check-mac.com/en/product_benchmark-apple_mac_min...
From the article, the minis they are using:
That's a rather nice number... it will need about 2000x of the current systems to match the current 500th spot.... however it would only take about 300 Mac M4Pro minis to get to the 500th spot today.
Reading Jurrasic Park, it as bit of fun hearing of how the island purchased multiple Cray super computer to help with genetic research. Fun even if its a bit of fiction.
Can it run Cray-1 software? The architecture is completely different. I coudn't get that from the article. It seems like a large cluster of Macs arranged superficially to look like a Cray-1.
There is Cray-1 emulation software that can run on modern pcs.
https://github.com/andrastantos/cray-sim
I imagine that they could run that on top of them and run official Cray software. The instructions are for Linux/Windows, but I bet it runs in homebrew just fine.
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/23/running-cray-os-and-unicos-o...
I spent the weekend setting up the open source Cray simulator on a really cheap SBC then vibecoding a weath forecasting application that uses the Cray's vector processor to process raw weather data.
Mine is a lot smaller, but it can run Cray workloads at full speed.
Just awesome; now they need SI to recreate Fortran in Rust to use Sketchpad?
I always wanted to build a mini CM-2 supercomputer with the red lights.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/supercomputer
What is SI?
Isn't the limit of supercomputing more about the data link speed than about the actual node compute speed?
Thats what I thought as well. I think its possible to use the Thunderbolt 1 port for that, but it would still be rather slow.
Well, you would need a crossbar switch to make that full NxN connection matrix. That's the hard part.
How are the Mac minis so flat? Is that the actual shape or have they been gutted?
It's the original housing and dimensions. 2012 Mac Minis were around 20cm × 20cm square × 3.6cm high
Woah, neat. Looks like they were roughly the same shape until quite recently.
30 macs in a Cray looking case?
They could rent out all that compute to subsidy the museum running costs.
Rather than rent it out (maybe some people would pay a few bucks a year for novelty web/mail hosting, but it's both too much and too little for most use cases, running the program of renting it probably eats up a lot of the revenue), maybe they could give compute time to universities for free, with the requirement that they provide some sort of display for museum visitors? There's probably some people with Monte Carlo simulations that could benefit from a lot of cores (if they get the M4 upgrade) while being on a student budget of $0. And if no one has requested it, they could run some BOINC project that has a nice visualization.
Yeah all good ideas, hope they take up some of these.
I doubt distributed compute in a bunch of old i7s is worth much once you factor in the electricity cost
The RAM shortage is bad, but not that bad (yet).
You think it's bad now?
New 48GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM chips are retailing for £2.5K each in the UK.
imagine showing even the first iphone to a Cray engineer in 1976
they'd lose their minds lol
(Cray-1 was 160 megaflops, smartphones are teraflops)
The Cray-1 was measured on 64-bit FLOPS, so you would have to do apples-to-apples (heh). A modern iPhone can do 300 GF of 64-bit, so only 2000x.
The iPhone 4 was probably the first that could beat a Cray-1, and it was by a narrow margin. However, that was only a 32-bit chip. The next year iPhones went 64-bit, and it was all over.
We live in an amazing era, where the limit to what we can do is (almost?) more what we can imagine to do than what we are actually able to do.
I phrase this to my kids in a different way, but same exact sentiment: The only limit these days is a modest amount of resources and the ideas in your head.
ie. Feature film? Sure. Music album, sure. Your own electronics project designed at the kitchen table, ordered from china, housings printed on the 3d printer -- all from the table.
It is an absolutely astoundingly low bar of entry these days to almost anything you'd like to create or build.
What is worth creating when anyone can create anything?
[dead]
oh, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what is a heaven for?
I genuinely love r/TheyDidTheMath corrections, thank you!
(now calculate it in iphone charger plug computing power heh > lunar lander)
There is also the issue of cooling. The iPhone will need extra cooling in order to function at full speed for more than a few minutes.
I don't think they would be that surprised. Look at the inside of the Cray-1: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/inside-red-yellow-cray-super...
If you were an engineer working on this machine, it was visually clear to you that the modularity took up the majority of the space. The ICs themselves were already pretty dense.
They wouldn't loose their minds.
Pace of computer power increase was huge even back then, so imagining something like a powerful pocket computer was quite an easy thing to do.
I can easily imagine that these engineers would be disappointed by the first iPhone because, by interpolation, they expected something like that by the early 1990's.
I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.
I don't get it, an actual Cray-1 getting refurbed would be much more exciting.
The picture with all the cables everywhere... ugh that sets off my OCD.
You should have seen the inside of the actual Cray 1.
do you mean this ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046734
That's the one.