The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer, powered by an array of 30 Mac Minis. The project, developed over 18 months, serves as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of both the Cray-1 and Apple's founding. Rather than utilizing modern high-performance hardware, the creative team assembled the cluster from 2012-era consumer machines.
In recent tests, the developers orchestrated 64 active processing cores within the array to achieve a combined performance of 1.3 teraflops. The museum reportedly reached 1.5 teraflops previously when utilizing all 70 available cores, before one node went offline. These benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. The hardware configuration consists of five quad-core i7 units and 25 dual-core i5 models. While most of the array dates to 2012, two units are from 2014.
The replica highlights the divergence in computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 employed vector processing, which applies a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously. Conversely, the museum's build splits tasks among separate processors operating as a parallel cluster. By comparison, the peak theoretical speed of the original machine stood at roughly 160 megaflops. The new build demonstrates that consumer hardware from over a decade ago can now surpass the capabilities of the purpose-built research machine that inspired it.