Homebrew Cray-1 140
egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."
he isn't running his webserver on it, is he? (Score:5, Insightful)
because it just got slashdotted...
Pretty cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the sorta hack that should feature on the front page, instead of machining tin can case and similar tripes.
Hope he gets some software for that thing.
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't everything run Windows?
Everything runs Linux, but Windows seems to run everything.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
Half the fun of explaining the Cray 1 during museum tours was comparing its cycle time to the time it took light from the nearby ceiling spotlight to hit the Cray. At 33 MHz that would require a really tall room.
Really cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The originals really are something else (Score:1, Insightful)
Firstly, it was about the size of my house at the time
What did you live in? a doghouse? -- the thing itself (not including cooling - and the mini-computer you needed to boot it) would fit in a 3m^3 space!
drank about £10,000 of liquid nitrogen per day if I wanted to turn it on
I have no idea why it would consume that much liquid nitrogen, ESPECIALLY because they were developed with liquid freon-based cooling from the outset... Unless. perhaps, someone did a case-mod on yours to OC it? :o
-AC
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, home computers were non-existant (I remember reading an article in Popular Mechanics about the cray 1 in 1976). I also owned a 'ultra-super-fast' home computer in 1981 ....with a zilog z80 processor. But the silly will say 'oh, but teh home computaz soo much festa now' to which I would reply ... oh, and on their behalf supercomputers are supposed to stop or slow down in order that they might catch up? Remedy: grasp head in hands, shake vigorously! And its true. Supercomputers were tens of thousands of times faster than home computers then, and it still holds true today: take a modern home computer, and compare it to a modern supercomputer. Anything else is folly. More extreme would be to take a modern supercomputer, and compare it to a home computer from 30 years ago.
Re:The originals really are something else (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a problem with the ability to post AC; it's a problem with slashdot's moderation, which is hugely broken. -1, troll, is the same as -1, disagree - and they're both very common. If you turn off by points, you turn off the comments the moderators disagree with, and those are quite often every bit as interesting and valid as something modded up to five. Likewise, some things can only be said as an AC; and that's why the role needs to remain, and why again, if you turn them off, you miss comments of value.
If an abusive post as AC resulted in something concrete for the account that posted it, we'd be saved from these idiots. But because the moderation is as much "disagree" as it is "troll", slashdot can't control the situation.
What they need to do is remove the downmods, so that "disagree" isn't possible. If someone is found to upmod a troll, that account never gets modpoints again, *and* that moderator's upmods are removed. Accounts need to be tied to something of value, like a $ubscription. Moderation needs to be accountable: everyone should be able to see who modded what posts up. Lastly, trolling should be accountable also: You get caught posting straight up abusive nonsense, the ability to post as AC goes away. Get caught again, your account goes away. Want back in? Fine. That'll be another $ubscription.
This would serve to (a) make sure that something found interesting, etc., rises. (b) trolling would be too expensive to pursue. (c) bad moderation would be too expensive to pursue. (d) the noise level would drop enormously. (e) We could begin to trust the moderators and (f) We could even browse by which moderators we are in sympathy with.
It won't happen, though, nor will any other fix; slashdot is frozen in time. So we just have to deal with the mod system in place, which, unfortunately, doesn't work worth a darn.