Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi

[fastneutron]

When I see comparisons like this, the first thought I have is not the benchmarks, but rather what the most “heroic” real-world calculation of the day would have been on something like the Cray-1, and how to replicate those calculations today on something like a RPi. Weather/climate models? Rad-hydro?

The fidelity would almost certainly be super low compared to modern FEA software, but it would be a fun exercise to try.

[buryat]

nuclear weapons simulations

the first machine went to Los Alamos

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/these...

[simbolit]

One of the early customers was the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, so, wild guess, they probably used it for medium-range weather forecasts.

[pge]

Not the Cray-1, but the Navy used a Cray 90 a few years later for CFD calculations modeling flow around ship hulls (code written in Fortran).

I wish I had access to the code I wrote back then - what took minutes or hours on the Cray could probably run in seconds on a RPi now…

[ip26]

You could always start with loading up Spec ‘06, which contains micro kernels of such “heroic” workloads.

[gshubert17]

I toured an NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) facility in Boulder around 1979; got to sit on a seat on their Cray-1. So yes, weather and climate calculations.

[DonHopkins]

A Cray-1 could execute an infinite loop in 7.5 seconds!

[bee_rider]

You could get some vintage matrices from SuiteSparse (formerly the university of Florida sparse matrix collection).

[devoutsalsa]

3-D rendering? We had a super computing club in early 90s high school. I remember creating wireframe images, uploading then to a Cray XMP at Lawrence Livermore for the computation, and then downloading finished results.

[DonHopkins]

I knew a guy who worked at one of the national labs that had its own Cray-1 supercomputer, in a machine room with a big observation window that visitors could admire it through.

Just before a big tour group of VIPs he knew would come by, he hid inside the Cray-1, and waited patiently for them to arrive.

Then he casually strolled out from inside the Cray-1, pulling up the zipper of his jeans, with a sheepish relieved expression on his face, looked up startled at the tour group gaping at him through the window, and scurried off!

[codezero]

To which they said, "Urine; A lot of trouble."

[blackoil]

Is there any software apart from benchmarks that will make it feel that fast. All softwares that I use feel more advanced version of things that I ran on my 386. GUI, IDE, compiler, office...

I understand that the exercise may still be theoretical as any sw used by Met now will be designed for million time fast computers. But there should exist some software that would have required Cray to run then.

[xcv123]

No. The Cray-1 ran batch processing jobs, mostly scientific simulations which took hours or days to compute. It had a terminal interface and wasn't used for real time interactive applications.

[yummypaint]

The best bet might be an old physics code written in fortran. Maybe calculation of scattering cross sections from matrix elements or something with alot of vectorizable linear algebra.

[KeplerBoy]

A lot of the stuff that took hours back then can now be done in sub-seconds.

Think about mechanical engineering: Back then they might have simulated how cars deform in a crash. Now we can perform similar simulations in real-time for fun in our video games. Afaik it's hardly ever done because no one actually needs physically accurate models in games, but it could be done.

Same goes for rendering back then they rendered each frame of toy story for a good few hours, now we achieve arguably better graphics in real time.

[wannacboatmovie]

I'm waiting for the follow-up from Jeff Geerling where he fits a Raspberry Pi into a Cray-1 enclosure.

[squarefoot]

I would totally love a Cray1 shaped PC enclosure. A even smaller one for Raspberry Pis would also be cool.

[arbitrandomuser]

Or as many as he can with networking

[snvzz]

It'd make more sense to compare with a RISC-V that has Vector 1.0.

Because a vector machine is what it was.

[voxadam]

Has anyone taped out a RISC-V CPU with hardware vector support yet?

[cmrdporcupine]

Well, or compare to a GPU or a TPU

[hooverd]

The RPi, unlike the Cray-1, does not offer ample sitting space.

[wolfgang42]

Somebody made a Cray-themed Pi Zero cluster which perhaps fits the bill (if you’re a mouse, that is): https://www.clustered-pi.com/blog/clustered-pi-zero.html

[tom_]

But for the price of the Cray, even without adjusting for inflation, you could buy a useful number of chairs. And just think of the electricity cost savings!

[m463]

yeah, the pi cases have been disappointing.

Few have adequate cooling. (flirc is good, the ones with fans are just annoying)

I'd love to have a pi case that had a built-in breadboard.

...or a case with comfortable seating.

[DonHopkins]

It's not just for sitting. The ultimate hacker fantasy is to get laid on a Cray-1 couch!

[geerlingguy]

Nor does it have quite the panache in its spartan design.

[widea]

Why not?

[qingcharles]

I'd just bought the latest and most expensive Intel x86 CPU in 2013 and built myself a new rig. My wife walked into the office, "You're not working, I can tell that, but I'm not sure what you're doing?" she said looking at the graphs on my screen.

"I'm calculating to see when my PC would have been the fastest on Earth. It looks like in 1992 it would be able to out-compute the latest Dept of Defense $90m supercomputer that filled an entire room, would you believe?"

"That's lovely. How will that help us pay our credit bills?"

Jesting aside. There is a bunch of data for this, like this set here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

And if you extrapolate backwards or find older data, like I did, I came to the conclusion that if I took my PC back to 1981 it would actually be faster than every computer on Earth combined, or some insane statistic like that.

[shagie]

One of my favorite machines from Top500 is SystemX.

https://www.top500.org/system/173736/

When it was commissioned in 2004, this array of 1100x Apple PowerPC 970 systems was the 7th most powerful computer on the list.

It's Linpack Performance was 12,250.00 GFlop/s.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The other fun thing is to find out the most recent year your phone would have made the bottom of the top 500 list.

[DonHopkins]

The Cray-1 has a much better couch.

[mherrmann]

TL; DR: ten years ago, Raspberry Pis and Android phones were a handful times faster. Nowadays, they are around 100 times faster. Pretty impressive, considering they fit in our pockets.

[eschaton]

I ran some comparisons a few years ago between a SPARCstation 20 Model 60 (the system for which the BYTE UNIX Benchmark is calibrated) and Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795324

An original RPi is who it 6-7x the performance of a SPARCstation 20 according to the benchmarks

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I remember watching a TV program about wave/fluid simulation (real time?) as a wow-wee demonstration of the power of a Cray-1.

In the meantime plenty of colleges and companies were running entire departments on a PDP-11 that had a fraction of the power.

Raspberry Pi faster than a Cray-1 is cool benchmark of how far we have come! The Cray had built-in seating though, which the Pi doesn't! :-)

[qgin]

It's wild to imagine that 40 or so years from now, someone will have a drawer full of cheap plastic boxes, each with more power than the fastest computing cluster of 2023... promising to themselves that one day they're finally going to build that hobby project with one of them.

[benj111]

The pi Pico would be an interesting comparison.

It doesn't have an fpu, and not much ram so it might actually be a close race for some of these tests.

[moffkalast]

Well I'm anxiously anticipating the first Micropython build for the Cray-1.

[auselen]

Recognizing the domain, you can read about the early history of benchmarks: http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone.htm

[whitej125]

Years ago when my daughter was around 5 I was showing her a raspberry Pi zero I had just picked up. I told her - years ago before Daddy was your age a computer like this used to be as big as a house. Her response was - “houses were that small?”

[nullhole]

There's a line in the Jurassic Park book where a character is made suspicious by an offhand assertion (by Nedry) that he is using a multi XMP system.

Rpi4s are nice, in a sense, because you can only rarely honestly claim that the speed of the system is holding you back. Most times, presumably, it's the efficiency of the operations you are telling it to execute.

[chatnealbot]

i wonder how moore's law figured into the pricing - for a nuclear simulation, makes sense you'd want to pay a lot, or basic science or political things like apollo moon missions, but for weather or commercial applications, if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away, though there's marketing aspect of how advanced your product is.. maybe this was before moores law though

[kergonath]

> if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away

And then you don’t get anything done because there is always a better computer just around the corner. Most of the time, proposals are written for hardware that already exist and don’t need the absolute best. If you have some CFD or MHD calculations to do for a rocket engine or a nuclear reactor, you don’t care about the computer on which it ran, just that it ran on time and did not hold the whole project back. Even cutting edge science does not require cutting edge hardware most of the time.

Just like buying a desktop next year won’t help you play games today, at some point you have to settle and accept that your hardware will be outdated by the time it comes online (it’s a bit better now, but leading HPC clusters still get obsolesced quite quickly).

> maybe this was before moores law though

The exponential character of available CPU time on larger computers was apparent before Moore’s law.

[timthorn]

The author's CV is as interesting as the benchmarks

[brcmthrowaway]

The author has the most British name ever.

[earthscienceman]

link?

[mikewarot]

I wonder where a Raspberry Pi Pico - based on the RP2040 fits in all of that.

[Havoc]

For a second there I thought there was a new sbc called cray. Well played