Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons

Steven Guccione

From Roy Longbottom.

“In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1”

Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets

SVB and SBF

Steven Guccione

I am a long time crypto skeptic. Not that I don’t think the underlying technology does what it claims to do. It’s just that as an engineer (by vocation and avocation) I just don’t see a use case for cryptocurrencies other than money laundering.

A key piece of money laundering involves “on ramps” and “off ramps”. How to get the money into crypto, then how to get it back out and into the regulated banking system. Banks, or probably more correctly banking regulators, don’t want money from anonymous sources sloshing into and out of banks, for all the usual reasons.

I recently read Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, mostly because I like Michael Lewis and though he could clear up the murky financial situation at FTX for me. I recommend the book but kept thinking of one very small comment. He implies that the recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was tied to crypto. I was, and still am intrigued.

Googling anything about crypto is all but useless, but I did come to the conclusion that there was something of a run on SVB to cover crypto losses on other platforms. This makes sense. It’s hard to blame cryptocurrencies directly, and it’s hard to imagine what to do about such a situation.

it also occurred to me that FTX was using its internal hedge fund (slush fund?) Alameda as a stealth on ramp / off ramp for their crypto products. This was in a way similar to how Silicon Valley Crypto Bros were using SVB as a sort of stealth on ramp / off ramp into the legitimate banking system. When crypto crashed there was a run on the regulated part of the banking system that provided the ramps to prop up the crypto losses. There is lots more to all of this, but I am beginning to understand the problems of linking unregulated cryptocurrency to the regulated banking system.

Major crypto coins stabilise after U.S. intervenes on SVB collapse

Leaving Texas because of its unreliable energy grid

Steven Guccione

We always figured we would retire someplace else, mostly because of high property taxes in Texas. We never had firm plans or even a vague idea of where else we would go, even after I had retired. The power blackout and it’s aftermath convinced me it was time to go. An article from Business Insider.

Some people are leaving Texas because of its unreliable energy grid and frequent power outages

Peace in the Middle East

Steven Guccione

An interesting read from September 2023 on the United Nations Web site. Premature, at best given the violence that has occurred since.

Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East, the Prime Minster continued, noting that as the circle of peace expands, a real path towards “genuine peace” with Palestinians can finally be achieved.

Israel on the cusp of historic peace with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu announces at UN

More Solar Data

Steven Guccione

When I put up the solar testbed I realized it wasn’t wven close to a good place for solar panels. It was just convenient. As winter moved in I noticed the angle of the sun was lower than I realized. On November 16 I decided to angle the panels a bit more toward the sun. This led to noticably higher peaks on sunny days.

The panels were also close to the east side of the house which put them in the shade most of the afternoon. So I bought an extra 20 feet of wire and moved the panels east a bit. This was on December 7. Unfortunately, many of the days have been cloudy, but the chart below gives the output per day. And even as I moved the panels to get more sun, the days got shorter and the sun lower in the sky. But I still was able to see a new peak output.

Some points. I learned that angles aren’t as important as I expected. In fact, panels that track the sun gets maybe 20% increase in output. Not trivial, but probably not worth the effort in most cases. And since the angle of the sun varies so much over the year (and through the day!) the angle for a fixed panel is just a sort of compromise anyway. So mostly people just go with whatever angle their existing roof is (of course). One thing that I didn’t appreciate was the effect of shorter days in the winter. There are some calculators on line that let you play around with this but the longer days in the summer make a big difference. Finally a good sunny day is really dramatically different than a cloudy day. All of this pushes toward larger panel arrays and larger batteries for going completely off grid, depending on where you live.

The last bit has to do with the way output is measured. In the graph below the shaded boxes at the top of some of the bars indicate different battery charging modes. So the days without these shaded bits are days the battery doesn’t fully recharge. This also brings up the point that output is just what you use. Unless you completely drain the battery, this isn’t showing the actual (potential) output of the panels. I tried to put some larger loads on sunny days to see what sort of peak I could get, but even that is hard to plan.