23 points pseudolus 1 day ago 10 comments
mrlonglong 9 hours ago | parent
They could rent out all that compute to subsidy the museum running costs.
latchkey 47 minutes ago | parent
The picture with all the cables everywhere... ugh that sets off my OCD.
ginko 36 minutes ago | parent
>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?
gs17 15 minutes ago | parent
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.
mat_epice 7 minutes ago | parent
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...
TrevorFSmith 31 minutes ago | parent
I know it's pedantic but this is a tribute or a re-envisioning but it's not a replica.
ck2 10 minutes ago | parent
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)
mat_epice 2 minutes ago | parent
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.