Mod of the Year 2010

Cray-1 by Daryl Brach (Pfaffen)

Original bit-tech article: Here
The Blue Gene and Cray XT5 are today's favourite number crunching leviathans, endlessly working away in fields such as climate modelling and astrophysics. Variants of each reside in the current top 10 fastest supercomputers on the planet. However, back in the late 1970s, Cray Research's Cray-1 was the supercomputer to have.

Despite the fact that Cray Research only sold around 80 of the machines, the iconic case design is still a lasting memory. The distinctive chassis not only housed 5.5 tonnes of computer hardware worth millions of pounds, but it also accommodated a refrigeration system.

The design certainly stuck in the mind of forum user Pfaffen (aka Daryl Brach), as he set about replicating the shape of the Cray-1 for this mod, building his own system inside it.