The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale replica of the 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer, built from 30 Mac Minis dating mostly to 2012. The project, developed over 18 months, is a 50th-anniversary tribute to both the Cray-1 and Apple's founding. By networking the machines together, the team achieved 1.3 teraflops of performance using 64 active cores, and previously reached 1.5 teraflops with all 70 cores before one node went offline.
For businesses, the replica demonstrates a cost-effective approach to cluster computing: repurposing obsolete consumer hardware instead of buying cutting-edge systems. The original Cray-1 peaked at roughly 160 megaflops, meaning this cluster of decade-old Macs is thousands of times more powerful. The team also solved a common data-center problem—noise—by mounting the Macs vertically in a steel chassis with aluminum trays, using passive convection cooling so the system is nearly inaudible.
The museum's custom control terminal, styled after 1970s designs, houses one master Mac Mini that directs the cluster. Visitors can watch matrix algorithms run in real time, comparing single-core performance to the full parallel suite. The project highlights how architectural shifts—from vector processing to parallel clusters—can be explained with tangible, working hardware.
The team now hopes to crowdfund 70–80 additional M4 Mac Minis to fill the empty half of the replica and potentially rank on the TOP500 supercomputers list. The replica is on permanent display alongside two unused authentic Cray CX1 systems, offering a hands-on lesson in how far computing has come. As the sole source for this story, Ars Technica provides no conflicting accounts of the project's details or performance figures.The user asked for a short article for the