A functional 1976 Cray-1 replica powered by 30 old Mac Minis

A museum built a working 1:1 replica of the iconic 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer using 30 obsolete Mac Minis.

Spain's Museo de Historia de la Computación spent 18 months building the tribute cluster, according to Ars Technica. The team networked 30 Mac Minis—mostly 2012-era i5 and i7 models—into a 64-core parallel array. Running macOS Mojave, the cluster relies on built-in Message Passing Interface (MPI) software to reach 1.3 teraflops in matrix-multiplication tests.

Why it matters: The original Cray-1 maxed out at roughly 160 megaflops. Today, 30 decade-old consumer desktops easily outpace that historic research machine by thousands of times—all while sitting in a custom steel rack that stays nearly inaudible using passive convection cooling.

Guests at the museum can watch the machine run algorithms in real time to see how performance scales from one core up to the full parallel cluster.

Not a bad second life for desktop hardware from 2012.