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Concept
Cray-1
Summary
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.
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.
From 1968 to 1972, Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation (CDC) worked on the CDC 8600, the successor to his earlier CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 designs. The 8600 was essentially made up of four 7600s in a box with an additional special mode that allowed them to operate lock-step in a SIMD fashion.
Jim Thornton, formerly Cray's engineering partner on earlier designs, had started a more radical project known as the CDC STAR-100. Unlike the 8600's brute-force approach to performance, the STAR took an entirely different route. The main processor of the STAR had lower performance than the 7600, but added hardware and instructions to speed up particularly common supercomputer tasks.
By 1972, the 8600 had reached a dead end; the machine was so incredibly complex that it was impossible to get one working properly.
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