Cray-1 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed by a team including Seymour Cray (who did the vector register technology) for Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976.
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2 History 3 External links |
Description
The Cray-1A weighed 5.5 tons including the freon refrigeration system. The computer had a 'horseshoe' cross-section in order to reduce wire lengths within the casing; no wire in the system was more than four feet long (1.2 m). It used vector processors and contained 200,000 specialized ECL circuits. The CRAY-1A had a 12.5-nanosecond clock (80 MHz), 64 vector registerss, and 1 million 64-bit words of high-speed memory (8MB of RAM). It could execute over 80 million floating-point operations per second (80 megaflops), and later Cray-1s increased this to a world-record speed of 133 megaflops.
In 1978, the first standard software package for the Cray-1 was released, consisting of three main products:
- Cray Operating System (COS) (later machines would run UniCOS, Cray's UNIX flavour),
- Cray Assembler Language (CAL), and
- Cray FORTRAN (CFT), the first automatically vectorizing FORTRAN compiler
History
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was Cray Research's first official customer in July 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks). The NCAR machine was decommissioned in January 1989. Priced from $5M to $8M, around 80 Cray-1s of all types were sold.The Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 500 megaflops Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985 the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 gigaflops peak performance, succeeded the two first models but met a somewhat limited commercial success because of certain problems at producing sustained performance in real-world applications. A more conservatively designed evolutionary successor of the Cray-1 and X-MP models was therefore made, by the name Cray Y-MP, and launched in 1988.
This is an Article on Cray-1. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Cray-1 External links
(from the copy at DigiBarn's collection, digitized and HTML'ized by Ed Thelen)