Cray-1

The Cray -1 was the first super computer Cray, whose architecture was developed by the team led by Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray was responsible for the technology of vector registers. The first Cray -1 in 1976 was put into operation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

History

The Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 received the first Cray -1 for 8.8 million U.S. dollars (equivalent to a present value of about $ 37.43 million ) and used the supercomputer and a nuclear weapon test calculations. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR ) was the first official commercial customer of the company Cray in July 1977. NCAR paid 8.86 million U.S. dollars, of which 1 million for the store. This Cray -1 was taken out of service until 1989.

In Europe, got in the fall of 1978, the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts ( ECMWF ), the first Cray. The center took with this number cruncher in 1979 with the first 10-day weather forecast its operation in Reading near London on.

With prices between 5 million and $ 8 million was about 80 Cray -1 sold worldwide. The U.S. Air Force Systems Command ( AFSC ) used a Cray -1 in the early 1980s also for the calculation of laser developments.

In 1982, the Cray -1 was replaced by the 500 MFLOPS fast Cray X -MP, the first multi-processor machine, the Cray. Came in 1985, the very advanced Cray -2 on the market. This was already able to achieve 1.9 GFLOPS in the tip. The success of this variant failed to appear, so that a slightly more conservative machine as the successor of the Cray - 1 and the Cray X -MP was developed, which was sold in 1988 under the name Cray Y -MP.

Description

The Cray -1A weighed including the freon refrigeration system 5.5 tonnes. To keep the cable length within the housing short (there were no cables that were longer than 1.2 meters) had a horseshoe shape. The Cray -1A was a vector computer and included an additional 200,000 specialized ECL circuits. Equipped with an enormous for its time clock frequency of 80 megahertz, 64 vector registers in the word width of 64 bits and a million very fast 64 -bit wide memory ( corresponding to 8 megabytes of RAM ), the Cray -1A reached over 80 million floating point operations per second ( FLOPS ). With a later version of the Cray -1, this value was increased even at 133 MFLOPS. Above all, the one million memory cells used the Cray -1A, including electrical power 115 kW. If you include the cooling, the value is approximately doubled. In 1978, the first standard software package for the Cray -1 was issued. It consisted of

• An operating system, the Cray Operating System ( COS), which, later, by a Cray - specific variant of Unix, which was replaced UNICOS,
• The Cray Assembler Language ( CAL) and