Cray-1
Encyclopedia
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
designed, manufactured, and marketed by Cray Research. The first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
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
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...
and the chief engineer was Cray Research co-founder Lester Davis.
History
In the years 1968 to 1972 Cray was working at Control Data CorporationControl Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
(CDC) on a new machine known as the CDC 8600
CDC 8600
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while working for the Control Data Corporation. The "natural successor" to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market.Development started in...
, the logical successor to his earlier CDC 6600
CDC 6600
The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...
and CDC 7600
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
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
SIMD
Single instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...
fashion.
Jim Thornton, formerly Cray's engineering partner on earlier designs, had started a more radical project known as the CDC STAR-100
CDC STAR-100
The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....
. 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.
In 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
William Norris
William Charles Norris was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world...
, 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 couldn't invest the money.
Cray left. Starting a new company HQ only yards from the CDC lab, both in the back yard of land he purchased in Chippewa Falls, WI, 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
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
and found a lineup of investors more than willing to back Cray, all that was needed was a design.
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
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...
and Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
, the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The National Center for Atmospheric Research
National Center for Atmospheric Research
The National Center for Atmospheric Research has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR is managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and sponsored by the National Science Foundation...
(NCAR) was Cray Research's first official customer 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. The company expected to sell perhaps a dozen of the machines, and set the selling price accordingly, but 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 Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
Cray X-MP
Cray X-MP
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...
, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985 the very advanced Cray-2
Cray-2
The Cray-2 was a four-processor ECL vector supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray Research X-MP designed by Steve Chen in that spot...
, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the two first 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
Cray Y-MP
The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL technology was used and a new liquid cooling system was...
, and launched in 1988.
Background
Typical scientific workloads consist of reading in large data sets, transforming them in some way, and then writing them back out again. Normally the transformations being applied are identical across all of the data points in the set. For instance, the program might add 5 to every number in a set of a million numbers. In traditional computers the program would loop over all million numbers, adding five, thereby executing a million instructions sayinga = add b, c. Internally the computer solves this instruction in several steps. First it reads the instruction from memory and decodes it, then it collects any additional information it needs, in this case the numbers b and c, and then finally runs the operation and stores the results.Vector machines
In the STAR, new instructions essentially wrote the loops for the user. The user told the machine where in memory the "big list of numbers" was stored, and then fed in a single instructiona(1..1000000) = addv b(1..1000000), c(1..1000000). At first glance it appears the savings are limited; in this case the machine fetches and decodes only a single instruction instead of 1,000,000, thereby saving 1,000,000 fetches and decodes, perhaps one-fourth of the overall time.But the real savings are not so obvious. Internally the computer's CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
is built up from a number of separate parts dedicated to a single task, for instance adding a number, or fetching from memory. Normally as the instruction flows through the machine, only one part is active at any given time. This means that each sequential step of the entire process must complete before a result can be saved. But the addition of an instruction pipeline
Instruction pipeline
An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of computers and other digital electronic devices to increase their instruction throughput ....
changes this. In such machines the CPU will "look ahead" and begin fetching succeeding instructions while the current instruction is still being processed. In this assembly line
Assembly line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which parts are added to a product in a sequential manner using optimally planned logistics to create a finished product much faster than with handcrafting-type methods...
fashion, any one instruction still requires as long to complete, but as soon as it finishes executing, the next instruction is right behind it, with most of the steps required for its execution already completed.
Vector processor
Vector processor
A vector processor, or array processor, is a central processing unit that implements an instruction set containing instructions that operate on one-dimensional arrays of data called vectors. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, whose instructions operate on single data items...
s use this technique with one additional "trick". Because the data layout is "known", basically a set of numbers arranged sequentially in memory, the pipelines can be tuned to improve the performance of fetches. On the receipt of a vector instruction, special hardware sets up the memory access for the arrays and stuffs the data into the processor as fast as possible.
CDC's approach in the STAR used what is today known as a memory-memory architecture. This referred to the way the machine gathered data. It set up its pipeline to read from, and write to, memory directly. This allowed the STAR to use vectors of any length, making it highly flexible. Unfortunately the pipeline had to be very long in order to allow it to have enough instructions in flight to make up for the slow memory. That meant the machine incurred a high cost when switching from processing vectors to performing operations on individual randomly-located operands. Additionally, the low scalar performance of the machine meant that after the switch had taken place and the machine was running scalar instructions, the performance was quite poor. The result was rather disappointing real-world performance, something that could, perhaps, have been forecast by Amdahl's Law
Amdahl's law
Amdahl's law, also known as Amdahl's argument, is named after computer architect Gene Amdahl, and is used to find the maximum expected improvement to an overall system when only part of the system is improved...
.
Cray's approach
Cray was able to look at the failure of the STAR and learn from it. He decided that in addition to fast vector processing, his design would also require excellent all-around scalar performance as well. That way when the machine switched modes, it would still provide superior performance. Additionally they noticed that the workloads could be dramatically improved in most cases through the use of registersProcessor register
In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available as part of a CPU or other digital processor. Such registers are addressed by mechanisms other than main memory and can be accessed more quickly...
.
Just as earlier machines had ignored the fact that most operations were being applied to many data points, the STAR ignored the fact that those same data points would be repeatedly operated on. Whereas the STAR would read and process the same memory five times to apply five vector operations on a set of data, it would be much faster to read the data into the CPU's registers once, and then apply the five operations. However, there were limitations with this approach. Registers were significantly more expensive in terms of circuitry, so only a limited number could be provided. This implied that Cray's design would have less flexibility in terms of vector sizes. Instead of reading any sized vector several times as in the STAR, the Cray-1 would have to read only a portion of the vector at a time, but it could then run several operations on that data prior to writing the results back to memory. Given typical workloads, Cray felt that the small cost incurred by being required to break large sequential memory accesses into segments was a cost well worth paying.
Since the typical vector operation would involve loading a small set of data into the vector registers and then running several operations on it, the vector system of the new design had its own separate pipeline. For instance, the multiplication and addition units were implemented as separate hardware, so the results of one could be internally pipelined into the next, the instruction decode having already been handled in the machine's main pipeline. Cray referred to this concept as chaining, as it allowed programmers to "chain together" several instructions and extract higher performance.
Description
The new machine was the first Cray design to use integrated circuitIntegrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
s (ICs). Although ICs had been available since the 1960s, it was only in the early 1970s that they reached the performance necessary for high-speed applications. The Cray-1 used only four different IC types, an ECL
Emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....
dual 5-4 NOR gate
NOR gate
The NOR gate is a digital logic gate that implements logical NOR - it behaves according to the truth table to the right. A HIGH output results if both the inputs to the gate are LOW . If one or both input is HIGH , a LOW output results. NOR is the result of the negation of the OR operator...
(one 5-input, and one 4-input, each with differential output), another slower MECL
Emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....
10K 5-4 NOR gate used for address fanout
Fanout
In digital electronics, the fan-out of a logic gate output is the number of gate inputs to which it is connected.In most designs, logic gates are connected together to form more complex circuits. While no more than one logic gate output is connected to any single input, it is common for one output...
, a 16×4-bit high speed (6 ns) static RAM (SRAM) used for registers, and a 1,024×1-bit 50 ns SRAM used for the main memory. These integrated circuits were supplied by Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957, it was a pioneer in transistor and integrated circuit manufacturing...
and Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
. In all, the Cray-1 contained about 200,000 gates.
ICs were mounted on large five-layer printed circuit board
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
s, with up to 144 ICs per board. Boards were then mounted back to back for cooling (see below) and placed in twenty-four 28 inches (711.2 mm) racks containing 72 double-boards. The typical module (distinct processing unit) required one or two boards. In all the machine contained 1,662 modules in 113 varieties.
Each cable between the modules was a twisted-pair, cut to a specific length in order to guarantee the signals arrived at precisely the right time, and minimize electrical reflection. Each signal produced by the ECL
Emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....
circuitry was a differential pair, so the signals were balanced. This tended to make the demand on the power supply more constant, and reduce switching noise.
The high-performance ECL
Emitter-coupled logic
In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....
circuitry generated considerable heat, and Cray's designers spent as much effort on the design of the refrigeration system as they did on the rest of the mechanical design. In this case, each circuit board was paired with a second, placed back to back with a sheet of copper between them. The copper sheet conducted heat to the edges of the cage, where liquid Freon running in stainless steel pipes drew it away to the cooling unit below the machine. The first Cray-1 was delayed six months due to problems in the cooling system; lubricant that is normally mixed with the Freon to keep the compressor running would leak through the seals and eventually coat the boards with oil until they shorted out. New welding techniques had to be used to properly seal the tubing.
In order to wring every possible ounce of speed out of the machine, the entire chassis was bent into a large C-shape. Speed-dependent portions of the system were placed on the "inside edge" of the chassis where the wire-lengths were shorter. This allowed the cycle time to be decreased to 12.5 ns (80 MHz), not as fast as the 8 ns 8600 he had given up on, but fast enough to beat his earlier CDC 7600
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
and the STAR. NCAR estimated that the overall throughput on the system was 4.5 times the CDC 7600.
The Cray-1 was built as a 64-bit system, a departure from the 7600/6600 which were 60-bit machines (a change also planned for the 8600). Addressing was 24-bit, with a maximum of 1,048,571 64-bit words ( 1 megaword) of main memory where each word also had 8 parity bits for a total of 72 bits per word. There were 64 data bits and 8 check bits. Memory was spread across 16 interleaved memory
Interleaved memory
Interleaved memory is a technique for compensating the relatively slow speed of DRAM. The CPU can access alternative sections immediately without waiting for memory to be cached. Multiple memory banks take turns supplying data....
banks, each with a 50 ns cycle time, allowing up to four words to be read per cycle. Smaller configurations could have 0.25 or 0.5 megawords of main memory.
The main register set consisted of eight 64-bit scalar (S) registers and eight 24-bit address (A) registers. These were backed by a set of sixty-four registers each for S and A temporary storage known as T and B respectively, which could not be seen by the functional units. The vector system added another eight 64-element by 64-bit vector (V) registers, as well as a vector length (VL) and vector mask (VM). Finally the system also included a 64-bit real-time clock register and four 64-bit instruction buffers that held sixty-four 16-bit instructions each. The hardware was set up to allow the vector registers to be fed at one word per cycle, while the address and scalar registers required two. In contrast, the entire 16-word instruction buffer could be filled in four cycles.
The Cray-1 had twelve pipelined functional units. The 24-bit address arithmetic was performed in an add unit and a multiply unit. The scalar portion of the system consisted of an add unit, a logical unit, a population count
Hamming weight
The Hamming weight of a string is the number of symbols that are different from the zero-symbol of the alphabet used. It is thus equivalent to the Hamming distance from the all-zero string of the same length. For the most typical case, a string of bits, this is the number of 1's in the string...
and leading zero count unit, and a shift unit. The vector portion consisted of add, logical, and shift units. The floating point functional units were shared between the scalar and vector portions, and these consisted of add, multiply, and reciprocal approximation units.
The system had limited parallelism—it could fetch one instruction per clock cycle, operate on multiple instructions in parallel, and retire up to two every cycle. Its theoretical performance was thus 160 MIPS
Instructions per second
Instructions per second is a measure of a computer's processor speed. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values...
(80 MHz x 2 instructions), although there were a few limitations that made floating point
Floating point
In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...
performance generally about 136 megaflops. However, by using vector instructions carefully and building useful chains, the system could peak at 250 megaflops.
Since the machine was designed to operate on large data sets, the design also dedicated considerable circuitry to I/O
Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
. Earlier Cray designs at CDC had included separate computers dedicated to this task, but this was no longer needed. Instead the Cray-1 included four 6-channel controllers, each of which was given access to main memory once every four cycles. The channels were 16 bits wide, and included 3 control bits and 4 for error correction, so the maximum transfer speed was 1 word per 100 ns, or 500 thousand words per second for the entire machine.
The initial model, the Cray-1A, weighed 5.5 ton
Ton
The ton is a unit of measure. It has a long history and has acquired a number of meanings and uses over the years. It is used principally as a unit of weight, and as a unit of volume. It can also be used as a measure of energy, for truck classification, or as a colloquial term.It is derived from...
s including the Freon refrigeration system. Configured with 1 million words of main memory, the machine and its power supplies consumed about 115 kW of power; cooling and storage likely more than doubled this figure. A Data General
Data General
Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer...
SuperNova S/200
Data General Nova
The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by the American company Data General starting in 1969. The Nova was packaged into a single rack mount case and had enough power to do most simple computing tasks. The Nova became popular in science laboratories around the world, and...
minicomputer served as the maintenance control unit (MCU), which was used to feed the Cray Operating System
Cray Operating System
The Cray Operating System was Cray Research's proprietary operating system for its Cray-1 and Cray X-MP supercomputers, and those platforms' main OS until replaced by UNICOS in the late 1980s...
into the system at boot time, to monitor the CPU during use, and optionally as a front-end computer. Most, if not all Cray-1As were delivered using the follow-on Data General Eclipse
Data General Eclipse
The Data General Eclipse line of computers by Data General were 16-bit minicomputers released in early 1974 and sold until 1988. The Eclipse was based on many of the same concepts as the Data General Nova, but included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office...
as the MCU.
Cray-1S
The Cray-1S, announced in 1979, was an improved Cray-1 that supported a larger main memory of 1, 2, or 4 million words. The larger main memory was made possible through the use of 4,096 x 1-bit bipolar RAM ICs with a 25 ns access time. The Data General minicomputers were optionally replaced with an in-house 16-bit design running at 80 MIPS. The I/O subsystem was separated from the main machine, connected to the main system via a 6 MB/s control channel and a 100 MB/s High Speed Data Channel. This separation made the 1S look like two "half Crays" separated by a few feet, which allowed the I/O system to be expanded as needed. Systems could be bought in a variety of configurations from the S/500 with no I/O and 0.5 million words of memory, to the S/4400 with four I/O processors and 4 million words of memory.Cray-1M
The Cray-1M, announced in 1982, replaced the Cray-1S. It had a faster 12 ns cycle time and used less expensive MOS RAM in the main memory. The 1M was supplied in only three versions, the M/1200 with 1 million words in 8 banks, or the M/2200 and M/4200 with 2 or 4 million words in 16 banks. All of these machines included two, three or four I/O processors, and the system added an optional second High Speed Data Channel. Users could add a Solid-state Storage DeviceSolid-state drive
A solid-state drive , sometimes called a solid-state disk or electronic disk, is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive...
, with 8 to 32 million words of MOS RAM.
Software
In 1978, the first standard software package for the Cray-1 was released, consisting of three main products:- Cray Operating SystemCray Operating SystemThe Cray Operating System was Cray Research's proprietary operating system for its Cray-1 and Cray X-MP supercomputers, and those platforms' main OS until replaced by UNICOS in the late 1980s...
(COS) (later machines would run UNICOSUnicosUNICOS is the name of a range of Unix-like operating system variants developed by Cray for its supercomputers. UNICOS is the successor of the Cray Operating System . It provides network clustering and source code compatibility layers for some other Unixes. UNICOS was originally introduced in 1985...
, Cray's UNIXUnixUnix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
flavor) - Cray Assembly Language (CAL)
- Cray FORTRAN (CFT), the first automatically vectorizing FORTRAN compiler
The US Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...
funded sites from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
centers (for high-energy physics) represented the second largest block with LLL's Cray Time Sharing System
Cray Time Sharing System
The Cray Time Sharing System, also known in the Cray user community as CTSS, was developed as an operating system for the Cray-1 or Cray X-MP line of supercomputers. CTSS was developed by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory...
(CTSS). CTSS was written in a dynamic memory Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
first named LRLTRAN which ran on CDC 7600
CDC 7600
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...
s and renamed CVC when vectorization
Vectorization
Vectorization, in parallel computing, is a special case of parallelization, in which software programs that by default perform one operation at a time on a single thread are modified to perform multiple operations simultaneously....
for the Cray-1 was added. Cray Research attempted to support these sites accordingly. These software choices had influences on later minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for...
s also known as "crayettes".
NCAR has its own operating system (NCAROS).
The National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
developed their own set of operating systems (AMOK and possibly TROTH) and languages, however, not much is known about them.
Libraries started with Cray Research's own offerings and netlib
Netlib
Netlib is a repository of software for scientific computing maintained by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Netlib comprises a large number of separate programs and libraries...
.
Other operating systems existed, but most languages tended to be Fortran or Fortran based. Bell Laboratories, as both proof of portability concept, and circuit design, moved the first C compiler to their Cray-1 (non-vectorizing). This act would later give CRI a sixth month head start on the Cray-2
Cray-2
The Cray-2 was a four-processor ECL vector supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray Research X-MP designed by Steve Chen in that spot...
Unix port to ETA Systems
ETA Systems
ETA Systems was a supercomputer company spun off from Control Data Corporation in the early 1980s in order to regain a footing in the supercomputer business. They successfully delivered an excellent machine, the ETA-10, but lost money continually while doing so...
detriment, and Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....
's first computer generated test film, Andre and Wally B
The Adventures of André and Wally B.
The Adventures of André and Wally B. is an animated short made in 1984 by The Graphics Group , which was later spun out as a startup company called Pixar...
.
Application software generally tends (note: present tense) to be either classified (e.g., nuclear code, cryptanalytic code) or proprietary (e.g., petroleum reservoir modeling). This was, Cray-1 history, because little software was shared between customers as university customers were few. The few exceptions were climatological and meteorological programs until the NSF responded to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project and created their supercomputer centers. Even then, little code was shared.
Museums
Cray-1s are on display at the following locations:- Bradbury Science MuseumBradbury Science MuseumThe Bradbury Science Museum is the chief public facility of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, located at 1350 Central Avenue in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States. It was founded in 1963, and was named for the Laboratory's second director , Norris E. Bradbury...
in Los Alamos, New MexicoLos Alamos, New MexicoLos Alamos is a townsite and census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, built upon four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau and the adjoining White Rock Canyon. The population of the CDP was 12,019 at the 2010 Census. The townsite or "the hill" is one part of town while... - Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology in Chippewa Falls, WisconsinChippewa Falls, WisconsinChippewa Falls is a city located on the Chippewa River in Chippewa County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 13,661 at the 2010 census. Incorporated as a city in 1869, it is the county seat of Chippewa County....
- Computer History MuseumComputer History MuseumThe Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
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, SwitzerlandSwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition.... - National Center for Atmospheric ResearchNational Center for Atmospheric ResearchThe National Center for Atmospheric Research has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR is managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and sponsored by the National Science Foundation...
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displays a similar, slightly larger Cray X-MPCray X-MPThe 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... - National Air and Space MuseumNational Air and Space MuseumThe National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1976. Located in Washington, D.C., United States, it is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and...
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External links
- CRAY-1 Computer System Hardware Reference Manual, Publication No. 2240004 Rev.C 11/77 (first three chapters) – From DigiBarn / Ed Thelen
- CRAY-1 Computer System Hardware Reference Manual, Publication No. 2240004 Rev.C 11/77 (full, scanned, PDF)
- Collection of on-line Cray manuals & documentation @ Bitsavers
- Cray Channels Magazine @ The Centre for Computing History
- Cray Manuals & Documentation @ The Centre for Computing History
- Cray Users Group Publications @ The Centre for Computing History
- NCAR Supercomputer Gallery
- Verilog definition of Cray-1A CPU logic