[bombcar]

What happened to the programs/problems the Cray 1 solved? If anyone can do it on commodity hardware - is it being done? Is it all solved?

[johannes1234321]

No. With more computing power the level of detail increased.

And some problems are even more complex.

My father spent his career on researching coil forms for Stellerator fusion reactors. Finding the shapes for their experiments then was a huge computational problem using then-state of the art machines (incl. cray for a while) and even today's computing power isn't there, yet.

Other problems we now solve regularly on our phones ...

[whartung]

A “famous” instance was the use of a Cray to render the collapse of Jupiter in the movie “2010”. A very early example of CGI in cinema.

[Cheer2171]

It was pretty basic models for tasks like weather forecasting and simulating nuclear reactions. We've come a long way on both the software modeling and hardware front.

[acidburnNSA]

We still use a lot of the same software for nuclear reactor simulations. They just run a lot faster.

[cratermoon]

Work in computational fluid dynamics is limited by computing power. Bigger and faster computers give more accuracy and speed.

[criddell]

Most are not solved but modern systems can generate better solutions. Think about problems like forecasting weather or finite element analysis of mechanical systems.