From Cray-1 to El Capitan: The Evolution of Supercomputers | Chaos Lever

Chaos Lever Podcast

Get ready for an electrifying ride through the history and evolution of supercomputers! From the groundbreaking Cray-1 to today’s mind-blowing El Capitan, we cover it all—with tangents about Interstellar, floating-point math, and why your iPhone is basically a mini-supercomputer. Join Ned and Chris as they unleash chaos on computing history! 🤖💻✨

What’s Inside:
📚 Seymour Cray: The genius who made supercomputers... and left his own companies
🔥 From mega-flops to exa-flops: Explaining performance in layman’s terms
🌍 Supercomputers solving global warming (well, trying...)

Take Our Survey!
💬 We want to hear from you! Visit https://chaoslever.com/survey and share your thoughts before the month ends.

Links:
- TOP 500 Linear Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#/media/File:Supercomputers-history.svg
- FLOPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point_operations_per_second
- TOP 500 64th edition: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/highs/
- Cray History Timeline: https://cray-history.net/2021/07/19/cray-timeline-documents/
- Cray Background: https://www.invent.org/inductees/seymour-cray
- Cray-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1
- Sneakers scene: https://youtu.be/coDtzN6bXAM?si=JvAwJb416pxRuANq&t=43

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome, Alleged Humans
01:28 Interstellar: Did We Learn Anything?
04:15 What Makes a Supercomputer "Super"?
10:12 Seymour Cray: A Singular Visionary
23:08 The Cray-1: Breaking Barriers in 1975
36:40 From Supercomputers to HPC Clusters
48:55 Modern Era: GPUs, Exa-Flops, and El Capitan
01:20:00 Fun Facts: Your iPhone = A Supercomputer in 2010?!
01:40:00 Wrapping It Up: Sneakers and PlayStation Supercomputers

Let us know your favorite fact from the episode in the comments! 👇