Museum Unveils Cray-1 Supercomputer Replica Powered by Mac Minis

<p>The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge technology, the project was powered by 30 Mac Minis from 2012. Developed over 18 months, this project serves as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Cray-1 and Apple's founding.</p><p>While Mac Minis from over a decade ago may not seem like the ideal choice for building a supercomputer, when networked together, the developers orchestrated the 64 active processing cores to achieve a combined performance of 1.3 teraflops in recent tests. The museum previously achieved 1.5 teraflops using all 70 available cores before one node went offline. Benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script, with five PCs being quad-core i7s and the remaining 25 being dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates back to 2012.</p><p>The replica serves as an educational tool for museum-goers to understand the evolution of computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 utilized vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously, while the replica distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The peak theoretical performance of the original Cray-1 was approximately 160 megaflops, showcasing how consumer hardware has become significantly more capable than the machine that inspired this replica.</p>