A Spanish computing museum built a full-scale visual replica of the 1976 Cray-1 using 30 Mac Minis, largely from 2012, as a working cluster and 50th-anniversary tribute. The array combines five quad-core i7 machines and 25 dual-core i5s (70 cores total when all are online) and has produced about 1.3 teraflops in recent tests (1.5 teraflops previously when all 70 cores were active), measured with a custom Python matrix-multiplication benchmark. The exhibit highlights the contrast between the original Cray-1’s vector architecture (roughly 160 megaflops peak) and modern commodity parallelism by letting visitors watch performance scale from a single core up to the full cluster in real time.
Practical engineering choices underpin the installation: macOS Mojave was used for its built-in MPI support, a master Mac Mini in a retro-styled terminal coordinates the nodes, and vertical mounting on aluminum trays inside a steel chassis creates a passive thermal chimney that keeps the cluster nearly silent (only two gigabit switches currently add 30-33 dB). Planned enhancements include aesthetic details like faux floppies and a keyboard shell, a crowdfunding push to add 70-80 M4 Minis with the aim of cracking the TOP500, and permanent public display with guided tours.
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