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Edition 2026-10-10

TECHNOLOGY

30 Mac Minis Recreate Cray-1 Supercomputer at Spanish Museum

The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has built a full-scale replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer using 30 2012-era Mac Minis.

By arstechnica · 12d ago · Source: arstechnica

Full article

The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has built a full-scale replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer using 30 2012-era Mac Minis. The project, completed after 18 months of development, serves as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the original Cray-1 and to Apple's early history. The replica achieves 1.5 teraflops of performance using 64 active processing cores, with benchmarks run via a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. Five of the Mac Minis are quad-core i7 models, while 25 are dual-core i5 units from 2012, except for two 2014 models. The system's peak theoretical performance of 160 megaflops contrasts with the original Cray-1's design, which relied on vector processing. The replica demonstrates architectural shifts from dedicated research hardware to distributed consumer-grade components. Instead of a Linux distribution, the team used macOS Mojave (10.14) to leverage built-in MPI support for inter-node communication. Cooling was implemented through passive convection via steel racks and aluminum trays, resulting in near-silent operation compared to typical server environments. The installation includes the Cray-1's signature padded bench seating and allows visitors to observe real-time matrix computations across the cluster's nodes.

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Publisher
arstechnica
Reliability
high
Published
10/10/2026, 11:23:01 AM
Retrieved
10/10/2026, 11:23:01 AM
Relevance
80%
Confidence
85%
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