Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Reproducing a Cray 1A supercomputer in a single FPGA

The Cray-1A first done the stage in 1976, weighing 5.5 tons (including a refrigeration complement as well as using at 80MHz — with the whopping 8MB IMPEL. Who wouldn’t want to own a single — or a miniature chronicle of one, for that matter? 
Chris's version was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. This is basically the biggest FPGA you can buy that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars for a development kit. Chris says that the Cray occupies about 75% of the logic resources and consumes all of the on-chip RAM. The result is a spiffy Cray-1A running at about 33 MHz with about 4 kilowords of RAM.

BAD HARDWARE: You would say so what? But, it is interesting to note that Cray 1A was US government export forbidden technology. I don't know if  that ban is still valid. Check before you buy your own Cray I. :)
One of the sad things about pre-internet machines (especially ones that were primarily purchased by 3-letter Government agencies) is that practically no software exists for them. The Cray-1 was so complicated, it required a dedicated mini-computer just to boot it !

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