Cray-1 supercomputer - photo

The Cray-1 supercomputer was by designed American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect Seymour Cray in the 1970s. The machine had a 64-bit processor running at 80 MHz, 8.39 megabytes of memory, 303 Megabytes of storage, and capable of 160 MFLOPS.

Fullsize image: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...r_fullsize.jpg
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...ercomputer.jpg


Previously:

https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...404#post150836
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...6452#post83701
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...896#post108875
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...2910#post97503
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...855#post144351

And things have come a long way since the 70's; this from Wikipedia...

As of April 2020, the Folding@home network has over 2.3 exaFLOPS of total computing power.[53][54][55][56] It is the most powerful distributed computer network, being the first ever to break 1 exaFLOPS of total computing power. This level of performance is primarily enabled by the cumulative effort of a vast array of powerful GPU and CPU units.

An exaFLOP is 10^18 floating point operations per second.

As I recall from my Electronics days, the entire Cray I was built using very high power consumption, but very fast for the day, Emitter-Coupled Logic with only AND/NAND gates.

Tribute to Seymour Cray:
https://hackaday.com/2019/01/15/seym...supercomputer/

As I recall, the Cray1 had a fluorocarbon coolant system, that actually flowed over the circuit boards to absorb the heat, then out to a heat exchanger that varied in shape by the customer's desires. Several computer rooms I recall that had Cray1's in the Silicon Valley had different shaped exchangers, made of clear Lexan, with waterfall like displays of the fluorocarbon inside.
One customer used to have the Cray Field Engineer add inert, non conductive green dye to the fluorocarbon at Christmas for a decorative touch.

Between 1972-1979 my late father worked in Data Automation for the USAF (Bergstrom AFB, Austin, TX) running programs via punch-cards onto giant upright tape drives about the size of refrigerators. To think that an original iPod had thousands of times more computing power than the Cray or any of these earlier systems is awe inspiring.

It was the Cray 2's that had the waterfall coolant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2...File:Cray2.jpg

The shape of the Cray 1 was because the interconnects had to be short because one nanosecond is 11.8 inches

https://americanhistory.si.edu/colle...ct/nmah_692464

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mklotz

And things have come a long way since the 70's; this from Wikipedia...

As of April 2020, the Folding@home network has over 2.3 exaFLOPS of total computing power.[53][54][55][56] It is the most powerful distributed computer network, being the first ever to break 1 exaFLOPS of total computing power. This level of performance is primarily enabled by the cumulative effort of a vast array of powerful GPU and CPU units.

An exaFLOP is 10^18 floating point operations per second.

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Yabba dabba doo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pa1963

Yabba dabba doo.

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Thanks for the content free comment. Are you usually this articulate?