•The Donanım History Museum has recreated the Cray-1, a supercomputer that debuted in 1976, using 30 Apple Mac Minis dating between 2012 and 2014.
The exhibit is designed as a tribute to both Apple’s history and the Cray-1’s 50th birthday this year. The original machine was noted for its distinctive C-shaped cabinet, but according to the museum, its composite parts make it technically more powerful than the supercomputer it recreates.
The display features five quad-core i7 Mac Minis alongside 25 dual-core i5 units, yielding a total of 70 cores. All 30 machines run macOS Mojave and use MacOS’ Message Passing Interface to distribute computing tasks between them. During testing with every core online, the exhibit reached 1.5 teraflops.
The original Cray-1 had a theoretical peak performance of about 160 megaflops.
The 30 Mac Minis sit within what the museum describes as a “natural convection ventilation system (without mechanical fans)” that manages temperatures while keeping cooling noise low in the museum space. Heat rises and exits through the top of the tower, minimizing cooling component noise.
The museum identified the exhibit’s two gigabit Ethernet switches as its biggest source of noise at around 30 decibels, noting it is looking to replace them with silent alternatives.
Everything is controlled from a vintage-looking terminal. The displays here are more recent Samsung screens rather than classic CRT monitors, chosen for ease of connectivity. The rest of the terminal comprises “a Raspberry Pi running classic environment emulators and managing a Raspberry Pi cluster, and two authentic 2006 Cray CX1 units running CentOS.” A Mac Mini inside this terminal conducts all of the others on distributed computing tasks.
The exhibit is on permanent display at the Museo de Historia de la Computación but is not yet complete. In addition to the installed 30 Mac Minis, the team hopes to crowdfund about 80 more M4 Mac Minis in order to build a modern supercomputer that can rank on .
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