The Steve Jobs of supercomputers: We remember Seymour Cray (at 90) Fast, cool, simple. Repeat.

The Register ^ | Oct 2, 2015 | Davin Clarke

[dayglored]

> The solution was a test stand that could run a board in air, but only for one millisecond at a time. The engineers would set up test vectors, then press a button to run for a millisecond, during which time the board would execute something on the order of a million clock cycles worth of processing.

Yep, that would do it... wow.

[dayglored]

> the ECL (emitter-coupled-logic) was very, very fast in its day. It was also power-hungry, incredibly electrically noisy and hard to get working reliably. As I recall, there were exactly four (4) different types of small-medium scale logic circuits in the CPU.

Yep. Years ago I designed a few products with ECL -- wonderful non-saturating/linear differential logic -- and had the "luxury" of using chips with one flip-flop per IC so I didn't have to build up the flops from gates.

The noise wasn't so much the logic gates themselves as it was the power busses and the 50-ohm termination supply. It took an outrageous amount of supply bypass capacitance, carefully distributed, to keep the thing stable.

But once you had it, it ran beautifully. I was never disappointed by my ECL circuits. Hell to build, but man they ran great.

[Swordmaker]

The anniversary of the Supercomputer (No not Apple Macs) — PING!

CRAY-1!
Ping!

The Latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword “ApplePingList” on Freerepublic’s Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[BereanBrain]

early Crays were octal. Hex came along later.

[Loud Mime]

Seymour Cray was killed in a traffic accident in Colorado Springs on the Academy Blvd. entrance to I-25 (North side of town). His computer company was on North Nevada avenue, just 3 miles from that scene.

After his death, they re-engineered the intersection. I lived at Colo Spgs at the time, and while visiting I cannot drive by that spot without thinking of him.

[roadcat]

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are Crays. The GOPe RINOs are TRS-80s. The DemonKKKrats are broken abacuses.

Hey, let's not disparage the abacus! When I was a young man, my mom would challenge me to calculate figures, me with a calculator, she with an abacus. She won every time. In the old days people relied on their minds, not computers, and got the job done. So let's just say the DemonKKKrats use broken marbles to attempt counting.

[M-cubed]

He ain't no Ahmad Mohamed....the inventor of the modern day clock!!

[re_nortex]

Hey, let's not disparage the abacus!

Actually I'm more of a slide rule man. :)

[GingisK]

My favorite geek joke from that era was, “Hey, did you hear about the Cray? It came out of an infinite loop in five minutes”.

[GingisK]

I tend to believe that. But I don't recall whether they said the loader was in octal or hex...

CDC tended to use hex. Octal and hex are both representations of binary.

[GingisK]

The 100mhz ARM that controls an ordinary SD card is more powerful.

Well, sort of. The Cray had quite a number of ports into memory to perform I/O. I saw a Cray that was front-ended with eight IBM 360s, each tasked with reading multiple tape and disk drives, card readers, and a fair number of 1403-N1 line printers concurrently. While the chips of today are amazingly fast, they do not interface with the world through so many peripherals. Also, the Cray had a floating point word size that today's microcomputers don't even come close to matching. The Cray was a floating point number cruncher, not a mere 32 or 64 bits in width. It consisted of a number of cores. The processor in an SD card doesn't even come close to those capabilities.

[GingisK]

Ah, the PDP-8. How lovely. I became completely enchanted with the PDP-11 when it came out. It had an octal face as well. I had to key in a boot loader to load a paper tape, which in turn booted the disk-based OS.

The Motorola 68000 family was very much like a PDP-11 with twice as many registers, and 32 bit ones at that.

I cut my teeth on an IBM 1130.

[GingisK]

I walked into that space within the Circle of Cray. It felt almost like communion with God.

[dayglored]

Those early years in addition to doing real work, I also played SPACWR -- actually StarTrek with short- and long-range sensor scans, photon torpedos, etc. with an ASR-33 for display, on a PDP-8L. And up at MIT where a buddy of mine was an undergrad there was a PDP-10 with real-time video display SpaceWar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar_%28video_game%29). That was mind-boggling.

The only PDP-11s I worked on directly were LSI-11/23 boxes -- one was in a Tektronix 8550 development system around 1982 and the other was the company main computer used for everything from secretarial memos to engineering software cross-compiles. I managed to snarf a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT) for the Tek box and after hours would reboot the box in RT-11 and run Adventure until the wee hours... ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building...")

I loved programming the 68000. What a lovely, symmetrical, easy to work with CPU. Got to write driver code for some handheld devices (based on a Dragonball CPU with a 68K core), only for half a year or so, but it was fun while it lasted.

[Bobalu]

That’s very interesting.

I’d always just assumed the Cray was a 32 bit machine.

The physical construction of the Cray looked like it was built by a plumber... all those copper pipes and fittings :-)

[Bobalu]

It came out of an infinite loop in five minutes

hahahahaha :-)

[Bobalu]

There was method of fast arithmetic developed by a Jewish man while in a concentration camp... gives one amazing skills at fast calculations.

"The Trachtenberg Speed System Of Basic Mathematics".

I have an old copy.. I think it's downloadable for free now.

[MNnice]

I taught the Cray XMP Operating System for Cray back in the early 80s.

[roadcat]

"The Trachtenberg Speed System Of Basic Mathematics".

I studied that while in middle school, on my own in the public library. I was a geek and math major. Fast way to do multiplications in your head by criss-crossing columns of digits. My mom still beat me using her abacus.

[zlala]

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