On October 10th, technology media Ars Technica published a blog post reporting that the Spanish Museum of Computer History commemorated the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Cray-1 supercomputer and the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc. By using 30 Apple Mac models from 2012, it took 18 months to recreate a replica of the Cray-1.
IT Note: The Cray-1 is a supercomputer designed by an American Cray Research company, led in development by computer designer Seymour Cray ( Seymour Cray ). The first system was installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States in 1976; from 1976 to 1982, it maintained the title of the fastest computer in the world for a long time.
The clock frequency of Cray-1 is 80 MHz, with a main memory capacity of approximately 8 MB. Its theoretical peak performance is about 160 million floating-point operations per second, which is 160 megaflops. It uses a 64-bit word length and enhances vector operation speed through a dedicated register and pipeline design.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of Cray-1 and also to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc., the Spanish Museum of Computer History created a 1:1 visual replica using 30 Mac models from 2012. The process took 18 months to complete, and the replica is now on public display at the museum.
The visual replica constructed this time consists of 5 quad-core i7 models and 25 dual-core i5 models. In the most recent test, 64 active processing cores were used, achieving a comprehensive performance of 1.3 teraflops. The cluster utilizes macOS and Mojave (10.14), and relies on a message-passing interface (MPI) to enable each node to transfer tasks. Visitors can observe the system running matrix algorithms and observe the performance changes when a single core and multiple nodes operate in parallel.
The museum installed 30 units of Mac mini vertically in steel enclosures and aluminum brackets, utilizing the natural convection formed by rising hot air for heat dissipation. According to the museum officials, almost no noticeable noise is emitted from the entire cluster; the two gigabit Ethernet switches located at the bottom of the exhibits are the main sources of noise, with a sound level of about 30 to 33 decibels.
