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Spain’s Museo de Historia de la Computación unveiled a replica of the Cray-1 supercomputer to mark the 50th anniversary of its first use in Los Alamos and Apple’s founding. The machine consists of 30 vintage Mac Minis, 25 dual-core i5 units from 2012-2014, and five quad-core i7 units, totaling 70 cores that produce a peak of 1.5 TeraFLOPS. This represents a theoretical 9,375-fold increase in power compared to the original Cray-1’s 160 MegaFLOPS. After one quad-core unit went offline, the current reported peak sits at 1.3 TeraFLOPS.

The original Cray-1 was the first commercially successful supercomputer, with 80 systems sold during its heyday. It utilized vector processing, a technique where computers process chunks of numbers in parallel rather than one instruction at a time. This method allowed the Cray-1 to handle gigantic datasets for tasks like weather prediction and nuclear physics efficiently. The replica showcases this evolution by using 70 modern cores to demonstrate how far technology has come since the original design.

The replica is cooled passively through a convection-tower design, making it extremely quiet with only Ethernet switches creating noise. Visitors can view it on a retro-style control terminal featuring a large metal desk and multiple screens embedded in a panel. On the screen, the system runs macOS Mojave to solve large matrix multiplication problems using Message Passing Interface (MPI), which spreads instructions across several Mac Minis for parallel computing. The museum plans to crowdfund 70-80 M4 Mac Minis to fill remaining slots and enter the TOP500 supercomputers list.