[HN Gopher] Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1
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Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1
Author : tosh
Score : 152 points
Date : 2020-12-21 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| immmmmm wrote:
| i remember finding one board of it in a drawer at my university.
| it instantly felt like a special piece of electronic history,
| even before i realized it was a cray! (i ran to the old cray in
| display in the hall and indeed was a board for it :)
|
| the guy at the computer museum was happy
| pklausler wrote:
| CAL was the most programmable (and readable) assembly language I
| ever got to use, and the machine encoding of the instruction sets
| of the Cray-1 and Cray-2/-3 were so clean that one could read
| code straight from an octal dump. I think that something
| important has been lost since those days.
|
| My favorite anecdote of 25 years on those machines is what we put
| into the 64-bit word at address 0 on the Cray-2. In ASCII, it
| read ~Z~E~R~O. If you jumped to it, it worked as four no-op
| ("PASS") instructions, and at word 1 was a jump to the library's
| routine that dumped registers and said "hey you jumped to a null
| function pointer". If you ever saw ~Z~E~R~O in a dump, you knew
| that a load from null had taken place.
|
| I still wish a modern ISA would implement real vectors; SIMD is
| still a distant second-best.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what you mean by real vectors? It's not
| immediately obvious looking at the Cray specs what
| differentiates it from the kind of SIMD we have today.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Support for vector chaining, I imagine.
| Animats wrote:
| The Computer Museum in Mountain View has a Cray-I. The last time
| I saw it, it was at the left side of the lobby, unmarked, and
| some caterers were using its padded bench seats on the power
| supplies to stack their stuff.
|
| Has anyone been able to emulate Tandem systems and their OS? That
| was a interesting high-reliability system, still worth attention.
| The hardware just cost too much back when it was a product.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| There are two in the Computer Museum - one on the left side,
| you can sit on this one :-). And then one in the actual museum
| area, this one is opened to show the insides.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Was there ever a GUI for Crays? I don't bet on it but think
| there's no image to run Doom on GCP or AWS for the same reason, a
| keyboard is not but a graphical array display is among
| requirements for void portDoomWithoutReason(); to be called from
| OnFoundCapableComputerDoomPlayable(machine Box)
| bluGill wrote:
| One of the purposes of X was to run the work on a super
| computer and display it back to your desktop. Generally it was
| expected that time on the super computer was too expensive for
| interactive use, but you might display back a running
| simulation to see status.
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| There was a third party frame buffer. Apple had one and used it
| to prototype advanced UX on their Cray.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| If all else fails, a vnc server might be an option...
| grawprog wrote:
| Well...since this is on HN, I wonder how long it's going to be
| before the new Cray 1 port of doom comes out.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Has anyone got one lying around?
|
| (It draws a mere 100kW at the wall, I'm guessing no)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| It actually has a 150kW 208v 3-phase generator set that
| provides power to the power distribution cabinet which then
| uses variacs to transform the voltage to 5v. The genset has a
| theoretical current output of 415A, pretty serious power!
|
| https://www.edn.com/cray-1-super-computer-the-power-supply/
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Sounds like a good thing to _not_ touch by accident...
| CrayBoy wrote:
| It's not Cray if the bowels; don't touch. Merry
| Christmas. May the light shine upon yous. < 3
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Just plug it in at a supercharger.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Ohm's Law says 5.2V @ 770A is only 4.004kW. With one of
| these on each of the three phases, that's a total of
| 12,012kW.
|
| So where did the rest of the power go, into cooling?
| Perhaps it was a linear power supply instead of a switcher?
| That would make for lots of inefficiency.
| kens wrote:
| The Cray-1 has 36 power supplies: 20 that supply -5.2
| volts, and 16 that supply -2.0 volts. (The weird negative
| voltages are for ECL, the fast logic family used in the
| Cray.) The bench around the Cray holds the power
| supplies.
|
| Interestingly, the power supplies themselves are
| unregulated; regulation is done by the motor-generator
| unit.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| Only 6$ an hour where I live, not bad.
| 83457 wrote:
| Computer History Museum had one when I stopped by about 10
| years ago. Not certain if operational as anything other than
| a cozy bench. Anyone know?
| kens wrote:
| No, the Cray is not operational. Only a few things at the
| CHM are operational: the PDP-1, the IBM 1401 lab, and the
| RAMAC disk drive.
| macjohnmcc wrote:
| When I was in high school we had a PDP System 10 and PDP
| 11 where I took a programming course on PDP-11 assembly
| language. It makes me feel old knowing these weren't
| antiquated at the time.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| Wow! Did you ever meet Charles Babbage? ;)
| mhh__ wrote:
| They used Freon coolant so it's possible they can't/won't
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Couldn't they use one of the freon substitutes like
| R-407c?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Not my area of expertise but if I had a literally
| priceless old supercomputer, I wouldn't necessarily want
| to risk running it outside of its intended operating
| conditions (especially after 40 years)
| grawprog wrote:
| This guy made one.
|
| https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
| Nomokis wrote:
| Man, this guy has some great articles.
|
| http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/
|
| http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/
|
| I just wish he'd made higher resolution pictures.
|
| He's also seriously hardcore (or maybe I feel out of depth
| because I'm a software guy):
|
| > I built a robot that would manually move the head forward
| 1/5200th of an inch at a time (there are 400 data tracks
| per inch, so this gives me a whopping 13 steps per data
| track!), while a high-speed analog-to-digital converter
| would take the analog signal straight from the drive's read
| amplifier and buffer it into an FPGA at a blistering 80
| million samples-per-second (like I said earlier, the theme
| here was overkill...the data was only changing at ~10 MHz
| or so)
|
| Related: http://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-
| cray-files/
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Here's a simulator:
|
| https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
| vidanay wrote:
| I'm disappointed they never released a Cray Z computer.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I've seen these in at least two museums (Computer History Museum
| in Mountain View, CA and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in
| DC). They definitely make for good museum pieces, and you could
| probably pull enough parts together to get at least one working
| if you really wanted to pull this off.
|
| Incidentally, a Cray-1 uses 115 kW of power when running. Would
| that be a new power consumption record for a device that's just
| running Doom?
| tnolet wrote:
| I saw one last summer at the Musee des Arts et Metiers in
| Paris. I was more fascinated then I expected
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Musee_des_Arts_et_Me...
|
| They looked more like abstract art pieces or 70ties science
| fiction props.
| codesnik wrote:
| interesting. that huge transparent block is here for
| aesthetics only?
| ajlburke wrote:
| I gather it was used to regulate the temperature of the
| liquid coolant - but instead of just some pipes or
| whatever, the designers turned it into a nice "waterfall"
| feature. I think it even lit up.
| [deleted]
| aarong11 wrote:
| Depends, we could always create a cryptocurrency which renders
| and plays doom in a distributed manner. Reward people with
| "DoomCoins"
| tempodox wrote:
| Wouldn't that make Doom much harder? In-game adversaries would
| take advantage and execute vectorized attack patterns supported
| by cached-ammunition flow. Would Doomguy be able to survive at
| all?
| whoopdedo wrote:
| On the other hand, I can't wait to see E1M1 in <4s.
| Something1234 wrote:
| What's E1M1?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Episode 1, map 1. The first level in Doom.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You should be okay with your Reciprocal BFG as a force
| multiplier.
|
| EDIT for those who may not have understood my comment. You
| would be hard-pressed to find a Cray that performed division
| and would instead need to perform a reciprocal multiplication
| in constant time.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| How do you compute the reciprocal without division? A
| precomputed lookup table?
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| A real working Cray 1 is a bit hard to find today, but in
| addition to the FPGA version by Chris Fenton that was already
| mentioned (https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/), there
| is also a simulator for various Cray models at
| https://github.com/andrastantos/cray-sim
|
| The biggest problems will be finding a C compiler for the Cray
| and adding a framebuffer output, I think... but this is a very
| nice challenge :).
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The biggest problems will be finding a C compiler for the
| Cray and adding a framebuffer output, I think... but this is a
| very nice challenge :).
|
| I suppose you could run Doom as a batch job: input is a file
| with the control input and output is a gameplay video.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Doom can record game sessions to LMP file format, which is a
| recording of the inputs on every frame. That's usually how
| people share runs in the Doom speedrun community. So yeah a
| LMP-to-video converter could be legitimately useful to some
| people.
|
| https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Demo#Custom_demos
| [deleted]
| dn3500 wrote:
| I ported parts of a TCP stack to the Cray X-MP in the 1980s. It
| was so fast that at first I thought it was broken. Hit <return>
| on the compile command line and the prompt would come right back
| almost immediately.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I used to program a Y-MP2 around 1990. That had an SSD and was
| the abolute fastest machine I had ever used at that time.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > 1990 > SSD
|
| Can you elaborate?
| lvh wrote:
| 1990 is probably a little early for something flash-based,
| but battery-backed DRAM- and CCD-based devices existed
| before that.
| rleigh wrote:
| Even Sinclair in the 80s had a prototype for the QL,
| which didn't go into production: http://www.computinghist
| ory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair%20QL%2...
| IncRnd wrote:
| It was at the NSCEE (National Supercomputing Center for
| Energy and the Environment) installation at UNLV for Yucca
| mountain. There were two vector processors and an amazing
| 5GB SSD. The OS was UNICOS, a successor of System V and COS
| (Cray OS), and a user was actually fully swapped out on
| context switches.
|
| The SSD wasn't new by any means. A decade earlier the
| Cray-1M optionally could have had an SSD.
| lvh wrote:
| To be clear, we're talking about battery-backed RAM
| (specifically MOS RAM) there, right?
| IncRnd wrote:
| I don't know how the solid state storage was implemented.
| There are bunches of Cray brochures on the Internet that
| might have that information.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't think it was battery backed by anything in the
| Cray, though I could be wrong. The general idea being
| that the Cray would be installed in a facility that
| should have massive whole AC circuit, true online type
| UPS, and generators backing that up.
| martyvis wrote:
| I guess a RAM drive, where you aren't using mechanical
| methods for mass storage, can be considered a solid state
| drive
| beamatronic wrote:
| Even the Amiga had a RAM disk
| makach wrote:
| RAM disk is the one thing I really miss on PC/Mac
| s_gourichon wrote:
| On most Linux /dev/shm is a RAM disk. Nothing to install
| even.
| nl wrote:
| You can easily setup a RAM disk on Windows at least.
|
| These days with M2 SSDs it isn't really necessary and (as
| was the case back then) you are usually better off using
| any spare RAM for programs.
| lreeves wrote:
| There are many software tools to give you a RAM disk
| these days on pretty much all major operating systems -
| even ones that give you a disk based off of GPU memory!
| Y_Y wrote:
| Has any of you actually successfully used a ramdisk
| recently on a modern GPU? The documentation available for
| doing this in Linux is pretty scarce.
| 1over137 wrote:
| You can still create RAM disks with macOS. See `man
| diskutil`.
| fentonc wrote:
| All of the early Cray mainframes (even the Cray-1 discussed
| here, although maybe only the somewhat later Cray-1/S)
| supported a "Solid State Disk" peripheral, which was
| basically a refrigerator full of RAM that was accessible
| via DMA channel. The intent was to be used to swap in and
| out large data sets from memory - I think even the early
| ones went up to a gigabyte in size.
| neilv wrote:
| I believe the idea also made its way to microcomputers
| (or was realized independently) shortly after, like with
| the SemiDisk:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040756/http://www.s10
| 0co...
| ardy42 wrote:
| This isn't about a Cray, but it's roughly contemporaneous.
| According to https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/handle/2014/26062,
| the Cassini space probe had an "SSD," and the contract to
| build it was awarded in 1992. It sounds like it was pretty
| much a RAM disk made from DRAM.
|
| I'd imagine it would be practical to build and use
| something similar for a multi-million dollar supercomputer
| where cost is secondary to performance.
| [deleted]
| walrus01 wrote:
| I have also seen mention of this in spacecraft design
| discussion. The concept being that for things which are
| powered from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator,
| it's safe to treat the RAM as storage.
|
| Because there's absolutely no scenario after launch, in
| which the constant trickle of wattage flow from the RTG
| to the onboard DC distribution buses and computers would
| ever be interrupted.
|
| If the power from the RTG were to ever be cut off it
| would be a catastrophic mission failure anyways, entirely
| aside from the power to the onboard computing systems
| being interrupted.
| jandrese wrote:
| Presumably the OS would be in some nonvolatile medium and
| the SSD would only be used for stuff like storing sensor
| data anyway. In the event of corruption or a system
| restart you would lose all of your working data but could
| bootstrap the system again.
| walrus01 wrote:
| It's my understanding that it wasn't a flash memory based
| SSD like we would see today, but just a huge amount of RAM
| (for its era) that could be used as storage. The facilities
| that typically hosted a Cray could be counted upon to have
| very reliable power, so the power failure risk of keeping
| stuff directly in RAM was low.
| dboreham wrote:
| ...and in red, since it was going so fast.
| freeqaz wrote:
| Or would it be shifted to be more blue??
| marcodiego wrote:
| Only if it was getting closer.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's the reply from the machine to you. It should be
| blue.
| cgriswald wrote:
| The message is always heading in the same direction. The
| relevant variable is the movement between the machine and
| you. You should probably hope it's red because if the
| machine is fast enough that the blue shift is perceivable
| to the human eye, it might be the last thing you see.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The Cray Computers felt like magic back in the day.
|
| A guy is making a replica. He had some issues finding the
| operating system and systems software but he overcame it
|
| Persistence pays off.
|
| I am sure it would be fun to part doom to it. Easier too since
| the new versions draws Considerable less power.
|
| https://gigaom.com/2014/01/14/the-search-for-the-lost-cray-s...
| arthurcolle wrote:
| How did he obtain the OS?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Per TFL,
|
| _" Andy Gelme, an Australian software developer who once
| worked for Cray. He too had a disk pack [containing the OS]."
|
| "For the greater part of the last year, [Tantos, a Microsoft
| electrical engineer] arduously reverse engineered the OS from
| the [corrupted / incomplete] image. Despite a few remaining
| bugs, the Cray OS now works."_
| musicale wrote:
| Until now?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| just picturing the Jurassic Park scene.....
|
| "This is E1M1. I know this!!"
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