Cray X-MP
The Cray X -MP was a supercomputer that was designed, built and sold by Cray Research. She was the first parallel vector processor -based computers of the company and in 1982 was the successor to the 1976 published Cray -1. She was from 1983 to 1985 the fastest computer in the world.
Description
The X -MP continued the "horseshoe " principle of the earlier computer and looked from the outside almost like their predecessors. The processors were clocked at 100 MHz ( 10 ns clock period ), were thus 25 % faster than the Cray -1A and allowed a theoretical computing capacity of 200 mega flops per processor, ie a total capacity of 800 mega- flops for the four-processor machine. The processors had also improved support for chained calculations, parallel arithmetic pipelines and access to shared memory across multiple pipes.
On this hardware initially ran the proprietary Cray Operating System ( COS), which Únicos ( a UNIX System V derivative ) could be run from a guest operating system option. UNICOS was from 1984 to the main operating system.
Equipment
The X -MP sold with one, two, or four processors and one to sixteen megawords ( 8-128 MB) a large main memory. While the memory was initially limited by a 24 -bit wide address registers to 16 mega words, the later XMP / EA - memory architecture extended the usable space on two theoretical Gigaworte. However, the largest produced in practice memory had only 64 mega words. The XMP / EA had a clock speed of 8.5 ns, which allowed a maximum theoretical computing power of 942 Mega flops. 1982 cost a X-MP/48 without mass storage about 15 million U.S. dollars.
Successor
In 1985, the Cray -2 was presented with a completely new architecture. With a clearly different from the X -MP compact four - processor architecture and 512 MB to 4 GB of memory should be reached in their specification up to 488 mega- flops, but in some calculations was slower than the X -MP, as their memory very large latency had (1986 a X-MP/48 a speed of 713 mega flop was measured at a standard LINPACK test).
Sold The successor series of the X -MP, the Cray Y -MP, was from 1988; she was an evolutionary development of the X -MP with a capacity of up to sixteen in their architecture not much changed processors.