A Cray-1 supercomputer replica from 30 "obsolete" Mac Minis

 (arstechnica.com)

22 points | by pseudolus 1 day ago

4 comments

  • TrevorFSmith 17 minutes ago
    I know it's pedantic but this is a tribute or a re-envisioning but it's not a replica.
  • ginko 22 minutes ago
    >The Cray-1 team hopes to fill the currently empty second half of the tower through a crowdfunding campaign to secure 70–80 additional M4 Mac Minis. The goal: create a cluster capable of ranking on the TOP500 supercomputers list.

    Is ~100 Mac Minis really all it takes to get into the TOP500 these days?

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    • gs17 2 minutes ago
      I don't think so, the lowest from 2026 was still 2.66 PFlop/s, so they'd need thousands of Mac Minis.
  • mrlonglong 9 hours ago
    They could rent out all that compute to subsidy the museum running costs.
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    • eric__cartman 1 hour ago
      I doubt distributed compute in a bunch of old i7s is worth much once you factor in the electricity cost
    • bigyabai 1 hour ago
      The RAM shortage is bad, but not that bad (yet).
  • latchkey 33 minutes ago
    The picture with all the cables everywhere... ugh that sets off my OCD.