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, 80 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.
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance of 800 MFLOPS. The principal designer was Steve Chen.
The ETA10 is a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation (CDC). The ETA10 was an evolution of the CDC Cyber 205, which can trace its origins back to the CDC STAR-100, one of the first vector supercomputers to be developed.
The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer, Seymour Cray's designated successor to the Cray-2. The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ICs packed into a 1 cubic foot (0.028 m3) CPU. The design goal was performance around 16 GFLOPS, about 12 times that of the Cray-2.
The SX-6 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer memory. The SX-6 processor is a single chip implementation containing a vector processor unit and a scalar processor fabricated in a 0.15 μm CMOS process with copper interconnects, whereas the SX-5 was a multi-chip implementation. The Earth Simulator is based on the SX-6 architecture.
The T3D was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of another company's microprocessor. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 2048 Processing Elements (PEs), each comprising a 150 MHz DEC Alpha 21064 (EV4) microprocessor and either 16 or 64 MB of DRAM. PEs were grouped in pairs, or nodes, which incorporated a 6-way processor interconnect switch. These switches had a peak bandwidth of 300 MB/second in each direction and were connected to form a three-dimensional torus network topology.
POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochester, MN; Austin, TX; Essex Junction, VT; T. J. Watson Research Center, NY; Bromont, QC and IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Böblingen, Germany laboratories. IBM announced servers based on POWER7 on 8 February 2010.
The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a fully distributed memory machine using a 3D torus topology interconnection network. The T3E initially used the DEC Alpha 21164 (EV5) microprocessor and was designed to scale from 8 to 2,176 Processing Elements (PEs). Each PE had between 64 MB and 2 GB of DRAM and a 6-way interconnect router with a payload bandwidth of 480 MB/s in each direction. Unlike many other MPP systems, including the T3D, the T3E was fully self-hosted and ran the UNICOS/mk distributed operating system with a GigaRing I/O subsystem integrated into the torus for network, disk and tape I/O.
The Cray C90 series was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The C90 was a development of the Cray Y-MP architecture. Compared to the Y-MP, the C90 processor had a dual vector pipeline and a faster 4.1 ns clock cycle (244 MHz), which together gave three times the performance of the Y-MP processor. The maximum number of processors in a system was also doubled from eight to 16. The C90 series used the same Model E IOS and UNICOS operating system as the earlier Y-MP Model E.
The Cray T90 series was the last of a line of vector processing supercomputers manufactured by Cray Research, Inc, superseding the Cray C90 series. The first machines were shipped in 1995, and featured a 2.2 ns (450 MHz) clock cycle and two-wide vector pipes, for a peak speed of 1.8 gigaflops per processor; the high clock speed arises from the CPUs being built using ECL logic. As with the Cray J90, each CPU contained a scalar data cache, in addition to the instruction buffering/caching which has always been in Cray architectures.
The Cray SV1 is a vector processor supercomputer from the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics introduced in 1998. The SV1 has since been succeeded by the Cray X1 and X1E vector supercomputers. Like its predecessor, the Cray J90, the SV1 used CMOS processors, which lowered the cost of the system, and allowed the computer to be air-cooled. The SV1 was backwards compatible with J90 and Y-MP software, and ran the same UNIX-derived UNICOS operating system. The SV1 used Cray floating point representation, not the IEEE 754 floating point format used on the Cray T3E and some Cray T90 systems.
The Cray J90 series was an air-cooled vector processor supercomputer first sold by Cray Research in 1994. The J90 evolved from the Cray Y-MP EL minisupercomputer, and is compatible with Y-MP software, running the same UNICOS operating system. The J90 supported up to 32 CMOS processors with a 10 ns clock. It supported up to 4 GB of main memory and up to 48 GB/s of memory bandwidth, giving it considerably less performance than the contemporary Cray T90, but making it a strong competitor to other technical computers in its price range. All input/output in a J90 system was handled by an IOS called IOS Model V. The IOS-V was based on the VME64 bus and SPARC I/O processors (IOPs) running the VxWorks RTOS. The IOS was programmed to emulate the IOS Model E, used in the larger Cray Y-MP systems, in order to minimize changes in the UNICOS operating system. By using standard VME boards, a wide variety of commodity peripherals could be used.
The Cray X1 is a non-uniform memory access, vector processor supercomputer manufactured and sold by Cray Inc. since 2003. The X1 is often described as the unification of the Cray T90, Cray SV1, and Cray T3E architectures into a single machine. The X1 shares the multistreaming processors, vector caches, and CMOS design of the SV1, the highly scalable distributed memory design of the T3E, and the high memory bandwidth and liquid cooling of the T90.
The Cray EL90 series was an air-cooled vector processor supercomputer first sold by Cray Research in 1993. The EL90 series evolved from the Cray Y-MP EL minisupercomputer, and is compatible with Y-MP software, running the same UNICOS operating system. The range comprised three models:
The Cray XMS was a vector processor minisupercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1990 to 1991. The XMS was originally designed by Supertek Computers Inc. as the Supertek S-1, intended to be a low-cost air-cooled clone of the Cray X-MP with a CMOS re-implementation of the X-MP processor architecture, and a VMEbus-based Input/Output Subsystem (IOS). The XMS could run Cray's UNICOS operating system. Supertek were acquired by Cray Research in 1990, and the S-1 was rebadged XMS by Cray. Its processor had a 55 ns clock period and 16 megawords of memory.
The Challenge, code-named Eveready and Terminator, is a family of server computers and supercomputers developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics in the early to mid-1990s that succeeded the earlier Power Series systems. The Challenge was later succeeded by the NUMAlink-based Origin 200 and Origin 2000 in 1996.
The HITAC S-820 is a family of vector supercomputers developed, manufactured and marketed by Hitachi. Announced in July 1987, it was Hitachi's second supercomputer, succeeding the HITAC S-810. The S-820 is categorized as a second generation Japanese supercomputer.
The term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, the IBM 7030 Stretch, and the Manchester Atlas, both in 1962—all of which were of comparable power; and the 1954 IBM NORC.
