Cray-1 Mockup For Home PC

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From the “too much time on your hands” news desk.  According to an article in TheRegister today, one Daryl Branch has built a scale model of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer as a place to house his home PC.  A few specs on the vintage 1976 behemoth:

  • 250MFLOPS
  • 200,000 integrated circuits
  • 3,400 printed circuit boards
  • 60 miles of wire
  • housed in less than 70 square feet of space

Branch describes the entire project from start to finish in this BitTech article.

I had the idea to create a scale model of a truly exceptional computer, one of the first supercomputers, the Cray-1. It was created to solve ‘Tomorrow’s Problems Today’, weather forecasting and climatology, petroleum research, structural analysis and nuclear research to name a few. [Daryl Branch]

Branch put two PC’s in the base.  Each had three SATA disk drives and an optical drive.  Amazing.