Circa 1990, I was a student at the Indian Institute of Science. The excitement was palpable. They have built a new multi-story Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) and an adjacent cooling tower. At Physics Department we were told that there will be shortage of liquid nitrogen once the supercomputer arrives. As an experimentalist, the supercomputer was not going to impact me. But my friends in various engineering departments, computer science, mathematics, atmospheric sciences, were excitedly waiting for it. If I remember it right, it was Cray 1, they will not give new Cray-2 or Cray X-MP to India.
In the end, the Republican government put an embargo on the Cray sale citing concerns that IISc could use it for dual purpose. Cray 1 never came to Bangalore. IISc spent the budget in buying more than 100 Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and HP workstations. In the end, it democratized the access to workstations; had it been Cray, only a select few might have been given access. Even a lowly experimental physicist could enter the SERC building and wet his feet on UNIX running on a Sun SPARC . (This unfettered access was major milestone in the history of IT industry in India, launching Bangalore as the Indian ‘valley’. That is a story for another day).
Now, the specifications of Cray-1 were:
- 80 MHz, 64-bit processor
- 8 MB max main memory
- Price - Approx $40 million (excluding the cost of infrastructure to house and cool)
- Weight - Approx 10 tonnes
Cray-1 was super popular and significantly outsold both Cray-1 and Cray X-MP. It had a raw processing power of 160 MFLOPS. Compare that to Raspberry Pi 5 now;
- 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
- 16 GB max memory
- Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
- Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
- microSD card slot, (you can easily slip in a 1 tb SD card into it)
- 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
- 2 × USB 2.0 ports
- Gigabit Ethernet
All these running on 5V/5A DC power supply. It costs $125 (USD) and sits in your palm. R-Pi 5 delivers 30 GLOPS!! That is 200 times faster than the Cray 1 at unbelievable cost.
No other industry has delivered this magnitude of technology leap (price and performance) in human history. Just compare this with performance improvements in automotive industry. We grounded Concorde aircraft 22 years back and have not even managed to reach that speed for passenger aircrafts now.