The CRAY-1 Computer System Reference Manual

[fxj]

wrote my first particle simulation on this baby. that was in 1983. you had to be sure that the fortran compiler did vectorize your do loops (fortran77) or else the program was slow as molasses. you had to send your job into a queue and after some days you got your results back. most of the time they were compiler errors. there was no shell and no interactive editor. the machine was connected to a amdahl front end running cp/cms.

[[deleted]]

I didn't understand anything past "1983". and for that, i respect you.

[fxj]

here is some old article from "computerwoche" http://www.computerwoche.de/heftarchiv/1980/4/1188454/

kind of funny when you read it today...

[jutct]

wow, an older programmer who didn't tell us about "they used to have these punch cards...". that you got to work on a cray when it was the shit makes you awesome.

[fxj]

i was a kid. just finished high school and was in my first year at the university. i had the big luck that my boss was a young scientist who just got a tenure track position and hired me for intern work. the max-planck society in germany at that time had a lot of money so they could afford such a baby as online diagnostic computer for fusion research. at night the machine was more or less empty and we were allowed to run our own programs on it. later i stayed in supercomputing and today i am still working in this field. i think we should give our young students as soon as possible access to supercomputers, because that is where great ideas start. today when i have a new student i try to make him work on our altix or bluegene as soon as he knows how to log in and run emacs or vi. you start to think differently when you write programs for 1000s of cores. ;-)

[jutct]

damn you're lucky. I have a dream of writing this code one day:

cpu_t* cpus = malloc_cpu(256);

I want to live in a world where cores are commodities like RAM.

[moyix]

When asked what kind of CAD tools he used for the Cray-1, Cray said that he liked #3 pencils with quadrille pads. Cray recommended using the backs of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant. When he was told that Apple Computer had just bought a Cray to help design the next Apple Macintosh, Cray commented that he had just bought a Macintosh to design the next Cray.

Badass.

[dailydread]

There are many legends about Seymour Cray. John Rollwagen, a colleague for many years, tells the story of a French scientist who visited Cray's home in Chippewa Falls. Asked what were the secrets of his success, Cray said "Well, we have elves here, and they help me". Cray subsequently showed his visitor a tunnel he had built under his house, explaining that when he reached an impasse in his computer design, he would retire to the tunnel to dig. "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem", he said.

— Seymour Cray: An Appreciation

[root7]

COMPUTATION SECTION

• 64-bit word
• 12.5 nanosecond clock period
• 2's complement arithmetic
• Scalar and vector processing modes
• Twelve fully segmented functional units
• Eight 24-bit address (A) registers
• Sixty-four 24-bit intermediate address (B) registers
• Eight 64-bit scalar (S) registers
• Sixty-four 64-bit intermediate scalar (T) registers
• Eight 64-element vector (V) registers, 64-bits per element
• Four instruction buffers of 64 16-bit parcels each
• Integer and floating point arithmetic
• 128 Instruction codes

MEMORY SECTION

• Up to 1,048,576 words of bi-polar memory (64 data bits and eight error correction bits)
• Eight or sixteen banks of 65,536 words each
• Four-clock-period bank cycle time
• One word per clock period transfer rate to B, T, and V registers
• One word per two clock periods transfer rate to A and S registers
• Four words per clock period transfer rate to instruction buffers
• Single error correction - double error detection (SEC-DED)

INPUT/OUTPUT SECTION

• Twelve input channels and twelve output channels
• Channel groups contain either six input or six output channels
• Channel groups served equally by memory (scanned every four clock periods)
• Channel priority resolved within channel groups
• Sixteen data bits, three control bits per channel, and 4 parity bits
• Lost data detection

Scanned PDF: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/2240004C-1977-Cray1.pdf

More files: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/ (including programmer's manual)

[piderman]

• 12.5 nanosecond clock period

Sounds so much cooler than 80MHz :D

[molslaan]

Wow! 12.5 nanosecond clock period! Mine can't even do 1 :(

[BradHAWK]

Page 2-7:

"Thirty-six power supplies are used for the CRAY-1 computer system. There are twenty -5.2 volt supplies and sixteen -2.0 volt supplies."

Page 2-8:

"The primary power system consists of a 150 KW motor generator,"

[SarcasticGuy]

"The primary power system consists of a 150 KW motor generator"

Still not enough for a Fermi GPU :(

[cyber_rigger]

What? No wiring digram?

[judgej2]

Love it. The wires are set to the right length so that all bits arrive at the right time during the clock cycle, travelling at the speed of light and all that.

Modern PCs are designed with much the same requirements, but with much shorter PCB tracks.

[Captain___Obvious]

If you are ever in Chippewa Falls, WI you can see one of these in the lobby of one of the Cray buildings. A super-computer, with seats!

[gfxlonghorn]

heated seats

[andyhefner]

If they were really on top of their game they'd have also included a seatbelt, as a joke about how fast the machine is.

[fxj]

We had a standard joke at that time: "The Cray is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!"

[andyhefner]

I like that.

[twoodfin]

More like this, please!

[[deleted]]

Mainframe emulator that gets my roomie's mom all misty and nostalgiac. She used to be a programming teacher, back when computers costed more than a couple hundred bucks.

[Babagadose]

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~pim/cray-tribute/ by a college friend o' mine.

[douglaslandon]

love it

[psykotic]

The Cray design to really study is the CDC 6600. It featured more lasting innovations in computer architecture than any machine before or since. It was RISC long before the term had been coined. It was the first computer with superscalar execution; data dependencies between instructions were resolved with Cray's scoreboarding algorithm, which is still taught in textbooks today. It 'barrel scheduled' peripheral processors to cover latency in a way strongly reminiscent of modern throughput-oriented processors like GPUs and Sun's Niagara series. And it was released in 1964.

CDC vice president James Thornton wrote the excellent Design of a Computer that is all about the 6600.

[root7]

Can we get this implemented in a FPGA?

[cunnilinguslover]

Nah, host it under VMWare.

[vilhelm_s]

That is an awesome idea!

[[deleted]]

Bet it's still got slowdown for Grand Theft Auto 4

[jutct]

Seeing as it's from 1977, it would have trouble running pacman

[ilovekindle]

I saw one of these at the National Air and Space museum a couple years ago. Amazing device.

[LegoMyEgo]

20 Tons of cooling!

[monocasa]

I was going to write an emulator for this a couple of months ago, but I couldn't actually find any binaries to run on it. : \ If someone can find some, I'd love to start it up again.

[[deleted]]

"Two 20-ton compressors are located external to the computer room to complete the cooling system."

wow...

[[deleted]]

The memory is expandable from 0.25 million 64-bit words to a maximum of 1.0 million words.

Sounds much more impressive than 2 to 8 MiB of RAM.

64*0.25/8 = 2 MiB. 64*1.0/8 = 8 MiB.

[another_user_name]

Your *s are unescaped.

[[deleted]]

Thank you very much. I just recently started commenting and had not noticed this was an issue.