News Supercomputer designer shrinks the Cray C90 to wristwatch size … sort of

[Admin]

An electrical engineer who designs real-life supercomputers took his love for Cray and built a supercomputer-inspired wristwatch.

Supercomputer designer shrinks the Cray C90 to wristwatch size … sort of : Read more

 

[kanewolf]

Having worked with REAL C90s, what is missing is the 1/25 scale cooling and motor generator that would require at least a backpack. If that C90 watch was powered by a car battery, then there is some realism.

 

[frogr]

but can it play Crysis?

 

[bit_user]

In Python, he wrote an n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons. Mimicking Cray vector instructions, he developed a program for the watch that shows a free-running simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons orbiting the gas giant.

Lost what little interest I had, when I saw that it didn't actually execute the Cray's native code. If he's not even going to do that, then he might as well just have made a custom case for a standard smart watch.

 

[Rob1C]

You're probably correct about the height: https://www.chrisfenton.com/1-25-scale-cray-c90-wristwatch/

An adventurous person would get UNICOS running on their Android watch: https://github.com/andrastantos/cray-sim - just an ASM -> C (or ARM ASM) conversion.

Less nerdy could try the online simulator: https://cray.modularcircuits.com/

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Having worked with REAL C90s, what is missing is the 1/25 scale cooling and motor generator that would require at least a backpack. If that C90 watch was powered by a car battery, then there is some realism.

One thing that still leave me in awe is how much tech has advanced.

Like how many times faster a current smartwatch is compared to the original Cray, for example or the famous photo of the 5MB hard drive being loaded on a truck, compared to todays SD Cards.

 

[kanewolf]

One thing that still leave me in awe is how much tech has advanced.

Like how many times faster a current smartwatch is compared to the original Cray, for example or the famous photo of the 5MB hard drive being loaded on a truck, compared to todays SD Cards.

C90s were 1990s. There have been 30 years elapsed. C90s had solid state disks in the 90s!! C90s had interfaces as fast as a 10GE interface in the 90s.
Granted it took rooms of equipment (the SSD was an entire cabinet). What you should be in awe of is how advanced the c90s were for the 1990s.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

C90s were 1990s. There have been 30 years elapsed. C90s had solid state disks in the 90s!! C90s had interfaces as fast as a 10GE interface in the 90s.
Granted it took rooms of equipment (the SSD was an entire cabinet). What you should be in awe of is how advanced the c90s were for the 1990s.

I am!

Was not aware of any of those facts!

 

[MacZ24]

Now cool it with LN2 and benchmark it with Geekbench for maximum uselessness.

 

[keninkc]

Nothing new under the sun ... when John Harrison won the Longitude Prize in 1773 for constructing the first chronometer usable at sea for finding longitude, it's primary competition was the astronomical method called "lunar distances" which used the moon's location against the backdrop of stars to determine the time, and hence determine longitude. Another astronomical method was based on eclipses of the Jovian moons by Jupiter. The eclipses could be used to determine time quite accurately. It was very difficult to train a telescope on the moons to catch the eclipses, though. The dependency on clear weather and a steady deck for the astronomical methods led to the adoption of the chronometer as the gold standard in navigation . . . at least until the advent of radio navigation (LORAN and Decca) and GPS eclipsed the sextant/chronometer method.

The n-body solution of this watch harkens back to the Jovian eclipse method of telling time . . .

Also, I worked for a large oil company who had a Cray computer in their data center in Dallas back in the day. For some reason, the covers on the Cray were a shade of pink. Mary Kay cosmetics was headquartered in Dallas at the time and were known for awarding pink cadillacs to their top salespeople . . . of course, it had to happen . . . the oil company's Cray computer came to be known as the "Mary Cray". Perhaps a pink "special edition" of the watch is in order. <grin>

An electrical engineer who designs real-life supercomputers took his love for Cray and built a supercomputer-inspired wristwatch.

Supercomputer designer shrinks the Cray C90 to wristwatch size … sort of : Read more