|
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 and it went on to become one of the best known and most successful supercomputers in history. The Cray-1's architect was Seymour Cray, the chief engineer was Cray Research co-founder Lester Davis.〔C.J. Murray, ("The ultimate team player," ) ''Design News'', March 6, 1995.〕 ==History== In the years 1968 to 1972, Cray was working at Control Data Corporation (CDC) on a new machine known as the CDC 8600, the logical 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. In fact the main processor of the STAR had less performance than the 7600, but added additional 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. Even a single faulty component would render the machine non-operational. Cray went to William Norris, Control Data's CEO, saying that a redesign from scratch was needed. At the time the company was in serious financial trouble, and with the STAR in the pipeline as well, Norris simply could not invest the money. As a result, Cray left CDC and started a new company HQ only yards from the CDC lab. In the back yard of the land he purchased in Chippewa Falls he and a group of former CDC employees started looking for ideas. At first the concept of building another supercomputer seemed impossible, but after Cray's Chief Technology Officer traveled to Wall Street and found a lineup of investors more than willing to back Cray, all that was needed was a design. For four years Cray designed its first computer. In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced. Excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was first official customer of Cray Research in 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) for serial number 3. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in 1989.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=SCD Supercomputer Gallery )〕 The company expected to sell perhaps a dozen of the machines, and set the selling price accordingly, but ultimately over eighty Cray-1s of all types were sold, priced from $5M to $8M. The machine made Cray a celebrity and the company a success, lasting until the supercomputer crash in the early 1990s. The 80 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985 the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the first two models but met a somewhat limited commercial success because of certain problems at producing sustained performance in real-world applications. A more conservatively designed evolutionary successor of the Cray-1 and X-MP models was therefore made by the name Cray Y-MP and launched in 1988. As a comparison standpoint, the processor in a typical 2013 smartphone performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cray-1」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|