Spain Museum Unveils Cray-1 Replica Built From 30 Old Mac Minis

Rather than sourcing expensive, cutting-edge hardware, the creative team powered the replica with decade-old consumer machines. In its most recent tests, the developers networked the 30 Mac Minis and orchestrated 64 active processing cores into a combined 1.3 teraflops of performance. The museum reportedly reached 1.5 teraflops earlier using all 70 available cores, before one node went offline. The benchmarks were obtained with a custom matrix-multiplication Python script, Ars Technica reported.

The array is not uniform. Five of the PCs are quad-core i7 systems, while the remaining 25 are dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates to 2012. Mac Minis from more than a decade ago may not seem like an obvious choice for building a cluster supercomputer, but when networked together they can be used to distribute computational work.

The replica is intended as a visual and educational stand-in for the original machine. The Cray-1, introduced in 1976, used vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements at the same time. The Mac Mini replica instead distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The original Cray-1 had a peak theoretical performance of approximately 160 megaflops. The museum's project re-creates a purpose-built research machine with consumer hardware that is vastly more capable than the machine that inspired it.

Ars Technica reported that the replica serves as a valuable tool for museum-goers to understand the shifts in computer architecture since 1976. The exhibit places the Cray-1's vector-processing design alongside a modern parallel cluster made from obsolete desktop computers, showing how the scale and source of computing power have changed.