Cray-1
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system.
| Cray-1 | |
|---|---|
A Cray-1 on display at the Science Museum in London | |
| Design | |
| Manufacturer | Cray Research |
| Designer | Seymour Cray |
| Release date | 1975 |
| Units sold | Over 100 |
| Price | US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $38.2 million in 2022) |
| Casing | |
| Dimensions | Height: 196 cm (77 in) Dia. (base): 263 cm (104 in) Dia. (columns): 145 cm (57 in) |
| Weight | 5.5 tons (Cray-1A) |
| Power | 115 kW @ 208 V 400 Hz |
| System | |
| Front-end | Data General Eclipse |
| Operating system | COS & UNICOS |
| CPU | 64-bit processor @ 80 MHz |
| Memory | 8.39 Megabytes (up to 1 048 576 words) |
| Storage | 303 Megabytes (DD19 Unit) |
| FLOPS | 160 MFLOPS |
| Successor | Cray X-MP |
The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. Previous systems like the CDC STAR-100 and ASC had implemented these concepts but did so in a way that seriously limited their performance. The Cray-1 addressed these problems and produced a machine that ran several times faster than any similar design.
The Cray-1's architect was Seymour Cray; the chief engineer was Cray Research co-founder Lester Davis. They would go on to design several new machines using the same basic concepts, and retained the performance crown into the 1990s.