The first supercomputer Bashny.Net

Today, supercomputers are helping people to solve a lot of problems, including weather forecasting, decode DNA and play "their game." A first computer, which came the name "supercomputer", this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. This Cray-1.





Seymour Cray to start work on the Cray-1 left the manufacturer of computers CDC, becoming its direct competitor. The work on the new machine it was decided to abandon the transistors by integrated circuits, as well as to refuse a multiprocessor system in favor of a vector processor. Instead of ferromagnetic cores was decided to use a semiconductor memory. This has led to a positive result: the first tests of the system showed performance 80h10 * 6 floating point operations per second.

Peak performance of Cray-1 was 133 Mflopsa. For comparison - the current number 1 ranking TOP500 supercomputer Tianhe-2, has the computing power of 33, 86 Pflops.

Processor machine is a printed circuit board 500 on which the 144 chips on both sides. Total was 144,000 chips. For cooling machine used freon.



The power supply system.



How rack looks inside.



What do you think who bought this supercomputer? As in the case of with this computer for 97 million pounds , one of the first on the need to purchase such a powerful machine thought The National Weather Service. So the National Center for Atmospheric Research gave for the right to use the Cray-1 supercomputer with the serial number 003 as 8, 86 million dollars. Now, if you believe that the calculator , this amount is approximately $ 39, 784, 472 of a penny. So that US residents are required to forecast the weather from 1977 to 1989, this particular car.

Seymour Cray is one of the first supercomputers at the University of California at Berkeley.



Cray-1 in a German museum.





Source: geektimes.ru/post/240944/