Released in 1985, each of the 27 made sold for between $12M and $17M. Learn more about us & read our affiliate disclosure. FUN FACT: When the Cray CS-Storm system launched in 2014, it was the worlds most dense GPU system. supply a world leading supercomputing capability, dedicated to helping government, industry and the public make better decisions to stay safe and thrive, with expected financial benefits of up to 13 billion (or 9:1) over 10 years, supporting the UKs economic recovery both across the UK and locally in southwest England. Early Cray-2 models soon settled on a design using large circuit boards packed with ICs. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. At the Computex event in Taipei this week, Nvidia announced four new systems equipped with its Grace- and Hopper-generation hardware, including two in Taiwan. This infographicbelow and the most recent press release summarisethe benefits the increased supercomputing capacity will deliver. FUN FACT: The Cray Y-MP EL system was the first supercomputer Cray Research ever sold into the financial services industry and in Eastern Europe. Theyre a few of the CS series systems that have made the TOP500 supercomputer list. [2] They would go on to design several new machines using the same basic concepts, and retained the performance crown into the 1990s. Built on decades of supercomputing expertise, the HPE Cray software stack adds the productivity of cloud and data center interoperability to the power of supercomputing to bring you a new standard in manageability, reliability, availability, and resiliency. Using a pioneering device that connected the processor modules to memory, Cray eliminated all internal wiring. CUSTOMER FACT: Booked orders for 55 systems in its first year alone. In such machines the CPU will "look ahead" and begin fetching succeeding instructions while the current instruction is still being processed. The programming language Pascal was created on CDC 6000 series computers and it had other renowned specs, including data storage and processing power. FUN FACT: What do Shadow, Ollie, BeBop, and Nurion have in common? New welding techniques had to be used to properly seal the tubing. In 2019, HPE acquired Cray and with it opened a new chapter in a vibrant, ongoing supercomputing journey. He set the price to sell only a dozen machines but ended up selling over 80. HPE Cray supercomputers enable you to tackle infrastructure challenges that require the fusion of modeling and simulation workloads with analytics, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to create a single business-critical workflow. CUSTOMER FACT: Booked eight advance orders prior to announcement, FUN FACT: The T90 system was the worlds first wireless supercomputer. Specifications and Features Architecture: Cray XK7 Processor: 16-Core AMD Cabinets: 200 Nodes: 18,688 AMD Opterons Cores/node: 16 Total cores: 299,008 Opteron Cores Memory/node: 32GB + 6GB Memory/core: 2GB Interconnect: Gemini GPUs: 18,688 K20X Keplers Speed: 27 PF Latest Titan Articles Nurion made it all the way to number 11 in 2018. Other machines from the company, like the X-MP and Y-MP, outsold the Cray-2 by a wide margin. He decided that in addition to fast vector processing, his design would also require excellent all-around scalar performance. In the era of the CDC 6600 memory ran at the same speed as the processor, and the main problem was feeding data into it. CUSTOMER FACT: Railway Technical Research Institute was the first publicly announced customer for the CS series. Kolodzey, "CRAY-1 Computer Technology,", Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, North American Computer Chess Championship, Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology, Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, Cray-1 Computer System Hardware Reference Manual 2240004, Rev C, "Tom Swift Meets the Big Boys: Small Firms Beware", "Exploring the Floating Point Performance of Modern ARM Processors", "Fairchild 11C01 ECL Dual 5-4 Input OR/NOR Gate,", "Computer Museum of America - THE collection of computer artifacts", "Cray-1 Supercomputer (#38) and Memorabilia at the DigiBarn", "Two Cray Supercomputers Join Living Computers", "Cray 1A supercomputer, serial number 11, c 1979", TM44354 Dator Cray Research, Inc. Cray Research, Inc. 1976 SAAB Aerospace, 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, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cray-1&oldid=1156570578, US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $38.2million in 2022), Computer Museum of America, Roswell, Georgia, US, This page was last edited on 23 May 2023, at 14:30. That way when the machine switched modes, it would still provide superior performance. These cabinets can support processors up to 530W, and highly dense configurations of up to 512 processors per cabinet. And with balanced memory and I/O bandwidth, the Y-MP EL offered the highest throughput performance available at its price point. The Cray XC series is targeted at scientists, researchers, engineers, analysts and . FIRST CUSTOMER:Argonne National Laboratory. This Lab would later close, and a decade later a new facility in Colorado Springs would open. It replaced interconnect wires with electrically activated zero-insertion-force (eZIF) connectors with 400 signal contacts each. Normally the transformations being applied are identical across all of the data points in the set. Les Davis, Cray's former design collaborator who had remained at Cray headquarters, decided it should be continued at low priority. It could perform 160 megaflops, which broke the record during its time. Instead the system would be immersed in a tank of a new inert liquid from 3M, Fluorinert. The spiritual descendant of the Cray-2 is the Cray X1, offered by Cray. The Cray-2 was predominantly developed for the United States Departments of Defense and Energy. FIRST CUSTOMER: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. In fact, the Cray-1 was actually somewhat faster than the 8600 because it packed considerably more logic into the system due to the ICs' small size. A single Threadstorm processor could sustain 128 simultaneous threads. You may also continue with the address as you entered it if you are sure it is correct. It stayed among the top 10 for the next seven years. multiple data setsand multiple scenarios and projections)andareas of increased climate sensitivitiesenabling a much better calculation of risk. TECH STORY: The first Urika product was built for a graph-based approach to big data relationship analytics. HPE shared the vision that began with Seymour Cray. Up to 1.2billion for weather and climate supercomputer, Verification, impacts and post-processing, Climate information for international development, Science for Impacts, Resilience and Adaptation (SIRA), Atmospheric processes and parametrizations, Regional model evaluation and development, Environmental Hazard and Resilience Services, National Meteorological Library & Archive. The stack provides a comprehensive HPE Cray System Management suite for administrators, a hardened low-jitter HPE Cray OS, as well as the HPE Cray Programming Environment software development toolchain for developers. Mr. Cray formed Cray Research in 1972 to ask new questions. Its distinctive design reflected Seymour Cray's innovative engineering solutions and theatrical flair. [3] In 1975 the 80MHz Cray-1 was announced. [9] In all, the Cray-1 contained about 200,000 gates. . Cray XC40 Series Specifications Smaller and Faster: The Cray-2 and 3 - CHM Revolution Need help locating the right product for your business? Our improved climate predictions will continue to inform national climate change policy and feed adaptation and resilience decisions. A 10-year contract has been signed with Microsoft for the provision of this future supercomputing capability. [citation needed] A Data General SuperNova S/200 minicomputer served as the maintenance control unit (MCU), which was used to feed the Cray Operating System into the system at boot time, to monitor the CPU during use, and optionally as a front-end computer. He worked with CDC to create an improved version of the ERA 1103 and eventually developed the CDC 6600 in 1964. FUN FACT: A Georgia Tech researcher used PNNLs Cray XMT system to identify Twitters most influential users in 2009. Jim Thornton, formerly Cray's engineering partner on earlier designs, had started a more radical project known as the CDC STAR-100. 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. TECH STORY: The Cray XK series combined the Gemini interconnect, AMD multicore scalar processors, and NVIDIA many-core GPUs to create a true hybrid supercomputer. TECH STORY: The Cray CS series cluster supercomputers featured the latest in processing, networking, and cooling technologies while also being highly customizable for compute, data, and hybrid workloads. FUN FACT: Cray broke the petaflops barrier with Oak Ridge National Laboratorys XT5 Jaguar system (pictured). It was the foreground processor's task to "run" the computer, handling storage and making efficient use of the multiple channels into main memory. The company moved from scientific and governmental supercomputer solutions to commercial opportunities. Our three Cray XC40 supercomputing systems: Are capable of over 14,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second - that's more than 2 million calculation per second for every man, woman and child. The design was based on a Cray XT compute blade but used custom Cray Threadstorm chips. TECH STORY: The successor to the C90 line, the parallel vector processing Cray T90 series was available with one to 32 processors and provided up to 60 gigaflops of performance. Seymour Cray never expected the Cray-1 to be so commercially successful. Continue through checkout to submit a purchase request and select 'leasing' as your preferred method of payment. With the successful launch of his famed Cray-1, Seymour Cray turned to the design of its successor. It reached a peak speed of 1.9 gigaflops. The high-performance ECL 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. It will. Research conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1990s indicated that to a limited extent the perfluorinated polyether used to cool Cray-2 circuits would break down to form the extremely toxic gas perfluoroisobutylene. [2] At the time, Cray had created a poster showing the transparent "bubble chamber" that the cooling fluid was run through for visual effect, with a spill of the same material glistening on the floorthe joke was that if this actually occurred, the facility would have to be evacuated. Today's high-performance computing systems must be able to handle these massive and converged workloads, leading . Accelerate your data-first modernization with the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, which brings the cloud to wherever your apps and data live. It also manufactures data storage and analytics systems. Indoing so we, to increase our supercomputing capacity and performance sufficiently to support our weather and climate operational and research workloads for the next decade. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The Cray-2 then became the first to reach over 1 gigaflop. FIRST CUSTOMER: Los Alamos National Laboratory (pictured). HPE Cray supercomputers deliver application HPC and AI performance at scale, provide a flexible solution for tens to hundreds to thousands of nodes, and deliver consistent, predictable, and reliable performance, facilitating high productivity on large-scale workflows. An exascale is a quintillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. For instance, the program might add 5 to every number in a set of a million numbers. At the time of installation all three phases of our current supercomputing system appeared in the top 50 of the worlds most powerful computers. It was later developed into the EL90 series. Cray Unveils Its Smallest Super PC Ever | Tom's Hardware It supports a diversity of processor technologies, supports converged workloads, eliminates the distinction between supercomputers and clusters, and fuses HPC and AI workloads with the productivity of the cloud. Libraries started with Cray Research's own offerings and Netlib. FUN FACT:An exascale HPE Cray supercomputer is 6 billion times faster than the Cray-1. HPE Cray Exascale Supercomputers | HPE - Hewlett Packard Enterprise TECH STORY: The Cray M90 supercomputer series (originally called the Y-MP M90) was a large-memory variant of the Cray Y-MP system. The Cray-1S, announced in 1979, was an improved Cray-1 that supported a larger main memory of 1, 2 or 4 million words. Based on a recommendation by William Perry's study, the NSA purchased a Cray-1 for theoretical research in cryptanalysis. Jaguar had 200 cabinets, 224,256 processing cores, and at 1.759 petaflops was the worlds fastest from 2009 to 2010. 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. For example, combininginteracting wave, wind,rainand fluvial information in ensemble mode to provide probabilistic impact-based advice on coastal flooding, resulting in significantly improved decision making. Teams worked on the design for about two years before even Cray himself "gave up" and decided it would be best if they simply canceled the project and fired everyone working on it. One of its most significant architectural features was a dual-vector pipeline allowing each of the CPUs to deliver two vector results per functional unit every clock period. 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. 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. Prices provided in quotes by local resellers may vary. In order to gain another 10-fold increase in performance over the Cray-1, the goal Cray aimed for, the machine would have to grow more complex. Its first customer was the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center and 27 were sold in total. The Y-MP reached a peak speed of 2.67 gigaflops. To avoid this problem the new design banked memory and two sets of registers (the B- and T-registers) were replaced with a 16 KWord block of the very fastest memory possible called a Local Memory, not a cache, attaching the four background processors to it with separate high-speed pipes. Cray systems are a premiere example of functional working art. Our three Cray XC40 supercomputing systems: This power allows the Met Office to take in 215 billion weather observations from all over the world every day, which it then takes as a starting point for running an atmospheric model containing more than a million lines of code. The initial model, the Cray-1A, weighed 10,500 pounds (4,800kg) including the Freon refrigeration system. The earliest Cray supercomputers were used to help solve scientific problems. The real savings are not so obvious. The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. And he loved the allure of doing it all with simplicity and grace. NCAR has its own operating system (NCAROS). Users could add a Solid-state Storage Device with 8 to 32 million words of MOS RAM. Hint: Theyre not pet dogs. Apple M2 Processor vs. Intel i9: Which Processor Is More Powerful? All of these machines included two, three or four I/O processors, and the system added an optional second High Speed Data Channel. This means that each sequential step of the entire process must complete before a result can be saved. Todays supercomputers will have to handle exabytes of data in order to enable modern workloads to run in a productive, reliable, and expedient manner. Other articles where Cray-1 is discussed: Seymour Cray: His company's first supercomputer, the Cray-1, which came out in 1976, could perform 240 million calculations per second. We recently completed procurement to replace our existing supercomputing infrastructureby 2022, at the end of its useful life. The Cray-1 had twelve pipelined functional units. Adding four processors simply made this problem worse. TECH STORY: The T3E was unrivaled at efficiently and cost effectively scaling from tens to thousands of processors. Gemini delivered extreme messaging rates and much improved latency. The HPE Cray supercomputer can maneuver the convergence of HPC, AI, and data analytics workloads, coupled with explosive data growth. Relentless improvements changed things by the mid-1970s, however, and the Cray-1 had been able to use newer ICs and still run at a respectable 12.5 ns (80MHz). One solution to this problem, one that most computer vendors had already moved to, was to use integrated circuits (ICs) instead of individual components. 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. TECH STORY: The Y-MP EL supercomputer lowered the cost of entry for customers. The HPE Slingshot switch is available in a liquid-cooled blade form factor for the HPE Cray EX infrastructure and in a 2U air-cooled form factor for standard 19-inch rack deployments. The increased capacity of the current supercomputing system has enabled us to extend our forecast lead times, expand the area covered by our UK model and improve the accuracy of our prediction of small scale weather such as showers. Edge ports connect to supported Ethernet NIC or external routers at 100GbE or 200GbE. 8GB vs 16GB RAM: Full Comparison & Winner! Because of improved science and increased computing power, todays four-day forecasts are as accurate as one-day forecasts were 30 years ago. With a growing focus on data-centric computing and the convergence of AI and HPC workloads, interoperability has become an increasingly important consideration. petroleum reservoir modeling). Financing and service offerings available through Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company and its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively HPFSC) in certain countries and is subject to credit approval and execution of standard HPFSC documentation. Our supercomputer consists of three main systems - an identical pair of machines and a single larger system in a purpose-built data centre nearby. FUN FACT: Rolled out in 2016, the XC50 supercomputer could deliver 1 petaflop of peak performance in a single cabinet. This allowed the STAR to use vectors of length not limited by the length of registers, making it highly flexible. 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. TheClimateChangeRiskAssessment has also highlighted areas where more science isneeded andwill bepossible by increased computing power and more realistic scenario modellingavailable. Boards were then mounted back to back for cooling (see below) and placed in twenty-four 28-inch-high (710mm) racks containing 72 double-boards. The twin identical machines provide a highly resilient capability for running time-critical operational weather forecasts, whereas the third system provides research, development and collaboration capabilities. FIRST CUSTOMER: Sandia National Laboratories. HPE Slingshot contains several innovative features to consistently deliver reliable high performance under heavy usage, including adaptive routing that sends packets dynamically based on real-time, global information on load inside the network, and advanced congestion control mechanisms. At first, the concept of building another supercomputer seemed impossible, but after Cray Research's Chief Technology Officer travelled to Wall Street and found a lineup of investors willing to back Cray, all that was needed was a design. Future technology advances will continue to increase forecasting accuracy and enable more complex and realistic modelling of real-world processes on weather and climate timescales, ensuring the Met Office continues to provide the best predictions and advice. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. 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. This investment will help us provide the information Governmentneed to build a more resilient world in the changing climate. The 160MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. NCAR estimated that the overall throughput on the system was 4.5 times that of the CDC 7600. It drove the background processors by passing in the instructions they should run via eight 16 word buffers, instead of tying up the existing cache pipes to the background processors. For example,the next UKCP will feed intotheUKs5yearlyclimate changerisk assessment (CCRA) and our climate science will continue to be a vital contributor to the internationally important IPCC reports. Cray-1s are on display at the following locations: Cray-1 at the Computer Museum of America, Roswell, Georgia, US, J.S. Cray had previously attacked the problem of increased speed with three simultaneous advances: more functional units to give the system higher parallelism, tighter packaging to decrease signal delays, and faster components to allow for a higher clock speed. FIRST CUSTOMER: Alabama Supercomputer Authority. Explore HPE Cray Supercomputers price, features and quickspecs. Cray Supercomputer | HPE Store US 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. Meta Quest 2 vs Oculus Quest 2: Is There a Difference? The price for current Cray Shasta system supercomputers is around $9 million, depending on the configuration.