Museum Assembles 30 Old Mac minis to Replicate Most Successful Supercomputer, Builds Something More Powerful Than the Original

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Replica de un Supercomputer Cray-1 con 30 Mac Mini - YouTube

What's better than giving new life to hardware you already own? Dedicate your old technology to reviving older supercomputers.

At least, if you ask the Computer History Museum in Spain. The Hardware History Museum recently used 30 Mac Minis dating from 2012 to 2014 to revive the Cray-1 supercomputer (via Ars Technica).

First introduced in 1976, the Cray-1 was noted for its striking C-shaped cabinet. However, what is arguably more impressive about the new display is that its composite components are technically more powerful than the original device.

The museum exhibit has five quad-core i7s and 25 dual-core i5s, giving you a total of 70 cores for gaming. The 30 Mac Minis run on Mojave and use the MacOS messaging interface to transfer computing tasks between them. When all these cores were online during the test, the exhibition reached 1.5 teraflops.

The original Cray-1 had a 64-bit, 80 MHz processor and 8.39 MB of memory (PDF warning), with a theoretical maximum performance of about 160 megaflops. It's a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Apple and the Cray-1 this year.

So yes, this exhibit isn't just for show, as impressive as it is. But let's talk about that "tower": 30 Mac Minis are housed in a "natural convection ventilation system (no mechanical fans)" that manages temperature while keeping cooling noise low in the museum space. Basically, all the heat goes up and out of the top of the tower, while minimizing the noise of the cooling components.

Apparently the biggest source of noise is the exhibition's two gigabit Ethernet switches, which speak at about 30 dB (the museum team is looking to replace them with quieter alternatives).

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Everything is controlled from a very old looking terminal. The displays here are newer Samsung displays rather than classic CRT monitors for ease of connection. Otherwise, the terminal consists of "a Raspberry Pi running classic environment simulators and managing a Raspberry Pi cluster and two authentic Cray CX1 2006 units running CentOS." There is also a Mac Mini inside this terminal that does all the other work on distributed computing tasks.

The old-comes-with-the-new, look-how-far-you-have-come exhibition is on display at the Musée Histoire de la Computation - but it's not over yet. In addition to the 30 Mac Minis already installed, the team is looking to fund around 80 more Mac Mini M4s. why Hoping to build a modern and honest supercomputer that can be in the top 500 list.

Well, this is definitely one way to get more out of old hardware.

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4. Best mini computer: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, with a significant portion of that time spent working on PLAY print publications and PlayStation Official Magazine. When he's not checking out all things hardware here, he's either making an impassioned defense of a 7/10 game, daydreaming about his first novel, or envying the last time he got chased around a field with a giant foam sword.

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