The Computer History Museum in Spain has unveiled a visual replica of the Cray-1 supercomputer. The project, which took 18 months to complete, commemorates the 50th anniversary of both the Cray-1 system and Apple Inc.
The replica is powered by 30 Mac mini units from 2012, specifically five quad-core i7 models and 25 dual-core i5 models. The cluster runs on macOS Mojave and utilizes the Message Passing Interface to distribute computational tasks across nodes.
During testing, the system utilized 64 active processing cores to reach a peak performance of 1.3 teraflops. Visitors can observe the machine executing matrix algorithms and compare the performance differences between single-core and multi-node parallel processing.
The hardware is mounted vertically within a steel chassis using aluminum brackets, relying on natural convection for cooling. The museum reports that the cluster operates quietly, with the primary noise coming from two gigabit Ethernet switches, measuring between 30 and 33 decibels.
