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Back in 1978 I (i.e., the narrator Mr. Darling) worked for Cray Research, which made what was at the time the world’s fastest computer, the Cray-1. I thought it would be interesting to compare the Cray-1 with the latest model of iPhone, the iPhone 13. (this is a 2022 video) ItemUnisCray 1iPhone 13FactorWeightOunces176,000629,300Price (2022 $)202238,000,0001,00038,000SpeedMFLOPS16015,800,000100,000MemoryMB160512,00060,000Power consumptionkW115LiOn 20 hours Cooling Freon refrAir

The day after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century destroyed a seaside community on Maui, the barrage of 911 calls didn’t stop: Reports of missing people, stranded family members and confused tourists trapped without food or water lit up the emergency lines every few minutes, interspersed with reports of new fires starting and older ones flaring back up. The 911 recordings from the morning and early afternoon of Aug. 9 were the third batch of calls released by the Maui Police Department in response to a public record request. They show how first responders and emergency dispatchers — many...

For years, x86 processors and Linux have ruled supercomputing. Linux still runs 500 out of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. For just about as long, x86 CPUs have dominated supercomputers -- until now. On June 22, Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, powered by Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX SoC and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), became the first ARM-powered supercomputer to be dubbed the fastest computer in the world.  In winning over the others, it wasn't even close. Fugaku turned in a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the second-place IBM Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fujitsu has been...

Before Steve Jobs, there was Seymour Cray – father of the supercomputer and regarded as something close to a God in the circles he moved in. Jobs’ Apple Computer is reputed to have bought one of Seymour’s massive machines back in the day: a Cray, to design the brand-new Macintosh personal computer. This would have been a significant moment for a man of Jobs' character, not prone to flattering the inventions or ideas of others. In return, Cray is said to have quipped that he'd bought a Mac to design the next Cray. Cray – who would have been 90...

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson; Colossus, Cray, ASCI Red and Blue Gene. The names of boxing's heavyweights are never forgotten - and it's the same with the champs of the supercomputing world. These machines truly are like no others. Each is computationally more muscular than its predecessor; and for a while, each has claimed the title of the fastest computer in the world. But, as the calamitous fall of 'Iron' Mike Tyson showed us, champions are built to be felled. And so we've seem supercomputers come and go, growing from single processor machines capable of a...

Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) has reportedly agreed to sell its business to Rackable Systems for $25 million after returning to court today for bankruptcy protection. The sale is conditional upon higher bids offered at auction, and Rackable will also assume a portion of SGI's outstanding debt. Rackable Systems is server and data-center storage provider that is looking to add SGI's high-performance server systems used in supercomputers to its line of business. The terms of SGI's sale under bankruptcy results in $0.47 per share, which is 15% higher than the stock's closing price on Tuesday. Rackable Systems is currently facing a...

In a move that could have broad implications for the high-performance computing (HPC) market, Intel and Cray have announced a broad collaboration that will see engineers from the two companies work together on future products and projects.With the first Intel-Cray products appearing in the 2010-2011 timeframe, it's clear that three Intel technologies have caught Cray's eye: the native 32nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) scheme, and the forthcoming discrete, x86-based graphics product, codenamed Larrabee. Cray will plug all of these components into its SeaStar interconnect fabric, and when combined with Cray Linux they'll make for an HPC and...

Cray Supercomputer at Sandia Helps Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb Released : Tuesday, July 31, 2007 7:26 AM Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass. The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejeweled breastplates buried...

OAK RIDGE - Oak Ridge National Laboratory's newest computer is purring like a cat, and maybe that's to be expected. It is, after all, a part of the lab's "Jaguar" system, a Cray XT4 supercomputer that's reported to be the nation's fastest machine for open scientific research. Sixty-eight new cabinets for Jaguar arrived here from Cray's manufacturing center in Wisconsin late last year and were installed on the second floor of the National Center for Computational Sciences. "It's going through the acceptance testing," Thomas Zacharia, the associate lab director of scientific computing, said during a visit earlier this week. "It's...

ROLLINSFORD - Grammy-winning musician Robert Cray spent yesterday standing in a hayfield surrounded by shoes while his wife ordered him around. "I just want people to see what I deem as a war for no reason, but only for greed," Cray told reporters during a break in filming. "There's been nothing proven about weapons of mass destruction or anything like that and all these boots out here are of innocent victims."

One of the enduring myths about the so called modern "art" is the need (?) to understand it. According to its apologists without understanding there is no real or proper appreciation of the painting/sculpture that one is looking at. In other words a process that naturally begins and ends at the heart must begin in our brain. That means we have already made a wrong start. I remember a quote from Renoir, a painter who is not a favourite of mine but who, nevertheless, hit the nail right on its head when he said: "... art is about emotion, if...

IBM ASIC Technology Helps Power New Cray X1 Supercomputer 2 Jan 2003, 09:07am ET - - - - - 800 IBM ASIC Chips Feature Total Gate Count of 7.5 Billion IBM today announced that it is the sole application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology provider for the new Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) X1 supercomputer, which is now being shipped to customers. The Cray supercomputer contains 800 IBM ASIC chips, designed by Cray exclusively for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5 million, and a...

—Giant supercomputer to use more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processors for high-level simulations— SUNNYVALE, CA -- October 21, 2002 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the upcoming AMD Opteron™ processor based on Hammer technology is planned to power a supercomputer developed by Cray, Inc. intended for nuclear weapon engineering simulations by the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Cray has been selected to develop the massive parallel processing supercomputer, code-named “Red Storm.” The supercomputer is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than Sandia’s current “ASCI Red” supercomputer on Sandia’s 3D, full-physics simulation codes. The...