For the Cray 1 seats and design were an aesthetic / engineering solution. It had to dissipate and have so much power that the seats are basically the power supply. I also like that aesthetic it feels like you could discuss your problems there. Now power and rack units are somewhat standardized. Cooling can somewhat differ in that it could use liquid cooling but most use air .
And the reason for a circular design is so that the wire lengths could all be under 4 feet in order to achieve actual projected clock rates.
I saw the thing in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Highly highly recommend the museum to every HN user. I went through it twice, first with the greybeard volunteer guide, and then looped in by myself straightaway.
To offer a second opinion, the Cray-1 was the only thing I found cool about the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It was otherwise just a like a big website, the history was all dead. In contrast the National Museum of Computing next to Bletchley Had lots of computers turned on, with enthusiast volunteers demonstrating and explaining things. You could punch paper tape and feed it to the Dekatron and see the memory changing as the program ran, or poke at magnetic core memory sheets and someone was right there to discuss all the old tech.
I do miss the old "visible storage" Computer History Museum - where you could walk around and peek into so many great machines. The current version has been musee-ified to death. It might safer from flocks of school kids but a real shame for the rest of us.
They have very strict policies around powering up their devices. I tried to persuade them to look into the original IBM 2260 terminal font design (it is implemented as core memory with missing cores for bits and it resided in the terminal controller). Of course they said no.
My mind was absolutely blown by mercury delay line memory of the UNIVAC 1. The things we did before silicon dynamic memory were works of crazy engineering.
Is this a Williams tube or a Mellon tube? I have seen ONE or these, and they used to be more numerous than pocket change, at least the ones that no longer worked. Unused they were treated like fine crystal, used like empty beer bottles.
I wanted to hook one up in a tv to see a 1" movie, or maybe a 3/4" movie with the aspect ratio but the refresh rate was really slow, so it was useful as a memory.
You might also like the National Cryptologic Museum next to NSA's HQ. The Cray they have isn't as interactive, although you can sit on it for the Sneakers vibes. They have multiple Enigma machines you can play with which I thought was pretty fun
Very highly recommended. The Cray was very cool. Had to explain why there was a wire 11.8" long framed. ( Thank you Rt Gen Grace Hopper! ) I walked through twice without a greybeard, and then when I went with a guide... I started smirking when ever he made a mistake... He finally started asking 'Do you have anything to add?' and I only make a few small corrections, until we saw the wire. 11.8". I would think that the Cray would be designed to keep the wires under 3' 11.21" ( 4 nano seconds ) There are PICTURES! https://www.flickr.com/photos/carrierdetect/3599257794/in/ph...
> Cray 1 seats [...] feels like you could discuss your problems there.
A modern LLM supercomputer could take that contemplative bench a step further, to a therapist's couch.
Though, constrained by the modern standard datacenter rack form factor of supercomputers, maybe you'd have to suspend the patient vertically in a cabinet. So long as they're less than 19 inches wide/thick.
Seats 11 comfortably, bit warm during floating point operations. All the crays dissipated an enormous amount of heat. Today's machines, millions of times more powerful, disspipate thousands of times more heat.
You don't want to pack them too tight for heating/cooling reasons; it was never intended to be 'compact'. Plus, you'd loose the cool factor of having a Cray in your datacenter to show off to visitors.
Wait, serious question: was it not a bench seat? I've always assumed it was, and a quick Google finds several places claiming they were bench seats, though none of them terribly authoritative.
the corporate descendants of Cray, now owned by HPE, still win the contracts to build a lot of supercomputers. but it's not like the days of Seymour Cray himself, hand-designing every aspect of the system. They use off-the-shelf parts mainly, it's essentially building out a highly-specialized datacenter. the main technology that Cray contributes is the specialized interconnect.
I think “not viable for research” is not a thing, haha. At least, if the ratio of compute to communication is right, we can test our algorithms on old hardware using smaller problems.
Edit:
The SuiteSparse collection (formerly UF matrix collection) is really great for this. You can download matrices with their year and some context about their application. The ones smart people were trying to figure out how to solve 20 years ago on clusters. And then you can marvel at how your laptop smashes them using PARDISO or some other direct sparse solver. Or you can try to figure out a clever way to solve them with 10 year old hardware.
ime, They usually get sold, either as full packages or per rack. There are refurbishers who tend to handle the piecewise extraction of all worthwhile components. See also, the recent auctions of Cheyenne
They aren't usually re-used as full compute racks because the infra required (cooling, power) is non trivial.
For the past couple of decades at least, supercomputers are decommissioned when newer HW becomes so much more power efficient that it's cheaper to buy new hardware than keeping the old one running. Usually that lifespan is in the range of five years or so.
Of course, if you have free power (or say, the power bill is paid by a different department), sure go wild and keep that old darling running.
If my local Craigslist is any indicator the parts will be stripped down and resold. There were some very cool and very expensive, when new, SGI machines I found on my local Craigslist page.
I quickly closed the browser tab when I found out about the power requirements and noise.
These computers will probably not make it to CL but eBay and niche auctions might sell them.
