Quote:
Originally Posted by linum
the image you use for your avatar. It looks pretty cool but, what is it?
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The most iconic, and probably the most famous, supercomputer ever built, the
Cray-1.
Seymour Cray once said that Cray weren't so much computer designers as refrigeration engineers. The bench seats house the power supplies, not the cooling as some descriptions have it. The cooling was a massive installation much bigger than the machine and was located out of sight away from the computer room. The Cray software research centre in Minnesota was built without heating - in winter they used the waste heat output from their Cray-1 machines to heat the building.
It was roughly organised as a set of bit planes vertically, so it was literally 64 bits high! The propagation delay of electrical signals (5 nanoseconds per metre in copper) was a limitation on the machines' speed as it had a cycle time of 12.5 nS. Op-code execution rippled circularly round the machine and as it could overlap operations several "wavefronts" could be circulating at the same time.
Congratulations!
Thank you all.
(apart from Erel 
Linear Mode
