I present to you the chance to work on a desktop version of the Cray-1, by Craig Fenton:
As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?
Not really, but Wow. There’s software emulation, but this guy’s doing it in hardware using a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). They permit customized computer platform to be built in the field. I briefly looked at FPGAs for implementing some work project, of which I’ve mostly forgotten, but that work environment was too unstable to accomplish anything. A pity about that.
This was from the era when computers had presence. Here’s the old Cray-1A from Computing History:
They note:
In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research’s first official customer in July 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) [or roughly $38 million in 2018 dollars]. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in January 1979.
And here’s Fenton’s Civil War re-enactment piece:
Geek on!
[H/T Kevin M]
