This chart shows the approximate installed base of active Cray Research systems during the 1990s. The data that shows the XMP (red) being phased out in favour of the YMP (green) and the rise of the smaller J90 and EL systems (orange and yellow) in the later 1990s. The peek system install base in 1996 being
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Encyclopaedia of Parallel Computing David Padua – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana USA DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4 Copyright Information Springer Science+Business Media, LLC2011 Publisher Name Springer, Boston, MA Print ISBN 978-0-387-09844-9 Number Of Entries 796 This most excellent reference book is highly recommend to gain insight into the many aspects of parallel and high performance computing. Available in print
Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing (index) Read More »
This interesting book of conference proceedings can be read online here: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0f59n73z;brand=ucpress Set in ’93 being 10 years after the first Frontiers conference the talks capture the key topics during the early stages of the massively parallel processing era. Articles by Les Davis and Bo Ewald and others. Frontiers of Supercomputing II A National Reassessment
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Static can kill delicate electronics. From Cray Channels CC_V4_N4 “Cray Research’s new system test equipment focuses on quality.” The company’s newly-established in house system test facility includes a JEOL Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and a Tracor Northern Xray spectrum analyzer. The SEM and X-ray spectrum analyzer units together offer an extremely wide magnification range (10 to 180,000 times
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This collection of movies was distributed on a sales related CD and demonstrated some of the tasks that T90s and other Cray supercomputer systems performed. These are in Quicktime.mov format and are of low resolution which was normal for the time. Enjoy. Mini movie Bucket or T90 and C90 Mini movies Note: You may
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The representation of floating point numbers and the “accuracy”, repeatability and reversibility of arithmetic operations has long be a topic of discussion amongst Cray customer and scientific users. The Cray machines up to the C90 range all used 64 bit Cray floating point arithmetic. When representing the long smooth curve of real numbers using digital
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When you pay a few million $£€ for a supercomputer you expect great service. Here are a couple of service snapshots: An article about the introduction of the on-site module tester for XMP boards. From Volume 6 No 1 – Jan/Feb 1986 of Cray Interface The on site testing and repair procedures are described
Cray System Service snapshots 1989 and 1996 with remote support information. Read More »
A few links to videos of interest to Cray-History visitors. Most of these are created by the Computer History Museum. What’s All This About Gallium Arsenide?, lecture by Seymour Cray at Super computing 1988 includes industry history. The CRAY T3D Massively Parallel Processing System, lecture by Stephen Nelson and Steven Oberlin Cray Research – A
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The site has a couple of collections of public press releases available here. The first set covers 1993 to 1996 and the second set from March 2002 to Feb 2008. Lets us know if you can fill in the gaps. All documents were obtained from publicly available sources. 1993 to 1996 List CEA_ORDER.950424.txt
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Unicos is the operating system(s) that enabled application software and users to exploit Cray hardware. Unicos provided a Unix based envrionment with many extensions needed for systems with multiple users and a complex workloads. Unicos provided added security, resource control, programming languages, data management features as well as processing accounting. Unicos versions (from Wikipedia) Cray
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Cray Research focused on hardware but also made system and application software. Customers like to buy “a solution to a problem” and are rarely fussed by the actual technology used to deliver that solution. Alongside the need for developing language and systems software unique to the special Cray Hardware application software was developed. By having
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It has recently been announced (December 2023) that Les Davis has passed away aged 93. An early and foundational influence on Cray Research Les worked closely with Seymour Cray and John Rollwagon to deliver the vision of supercomputing. Lester ‘T’ Les Davis was a senior engineer at Cray Research. As an early employee he worked
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These two posters appeared side by side in Cray Channels V13_N4 as centre folds. Also distributed as wall posters. These two machines, at the opposite ends of the Cray performance spectrum, nevertheless less ran the same UNICOS operating systems and compiler environments. The EL often appeared at larger Cray sites acting as a software development
EL and C90 Poster Centerfolds Read More »
We would be very grateful If you have missing information or contributions / suggestions / stories or pictures for the site. Contact US Please Post an update on this page or email to webmaster@cray-history.net – Add XMP to Email subject line to avoid the spam traps. Some Background The idea and motivation behind Cray-History.net is to
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