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The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray 's supercomputer designs while he worked for Control Data Corporation . As 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. The design was essentially four 7600's, packed into a very small chassis so they could run at higher clock speeds.

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62-538: 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

124-672: A Lustre file system . In 2011, Cray launched the OpenACC parallel programming standard organization. In 2019, Cray announced that it was deprecating OpenACC , and will support OpenMP . However, in 2022, the Cray Fortran compiler still supported OpenACC, in part due to its usage in the ICON climate simulation code. In April 2012, Cray announced the sale of its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $ 140 million. On November 9, 2012, Cray announced

186-536: A lucrative investment for them). For his new work he abandoned the multiprocessor concept, concerned that software of the era would be unable to take full advantage of the CPUs. He may have come to this conclusion after the ILLIAC IV finally entered operation at about the same time, and proved to have disappointing performance. Team members convinced Norris that the 8600 could be completed even without Cray, and work continued at

248-540: A maximum measured performance of 5.9 teraflops, being the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world. Since then the X1 has been superseded by the X1E, with faster dual-core processors. On October 4, 2004, the company announced the Cray XD1 range of entry-level supercomputers which use dual-core 64-bit Advanced Micro Devices Opteron central processing units running Linux . This system

310-659: A number of follow-on designs were never completed. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1995. CCC's remains then became Cray's final corporation, SRC Computers, Inc . Cray Research continued development along a separate line of computers, originally with lead designer Steve Chen and the Cray X-MP . After Chen's departure, the Cray Y-MP , Cray C90 and Cray T90 were developed on the original Cray-1 architecture but achieved much greater performance via multiple additional processors, faster clocks, and wider vector pipes. The uncertainty of

372-501: A pair of PowerPC 405 processors which can add to the already considerable power of a single node. The Cray XD1, although moderately successful, was eventually discontinued. In 2004, Cray completed the Red Storm system for Sandia National Laboratories . Red Storm was to become the jumping-off point for a string of successful products that eventually revitalized Cray in supercomputing. Red Storm had processors clustered in 96 unit cabinets,

434-615: A similar spin-off in 1989, Cray Computer Corporation (CCC) in Colorado Springs, Colorado , where he worked on the Cray-3 project—the first attempt at major use of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing. However, the changing political climate (collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War ) resulted in poor sales prospects. Ultimately, only one Cray-3 was delivered, and

496-420: A small space, cooling was a major design issue. Cray's refrigeration engineer, Dean Roush, formerly of Amana , placed a sheet of copper inside each of the circuit boards, removing the heat to a copper block on one end where it was cooled by a freon system. This further increased the weight and complexity of the modules, to the point where each one weighed about 15 pounds (6.8 kg). The external cooling system

558-427: A stack the size of a large textbook and using up about 3 kilowatts of power. The modules were then packed into a mainframe chassis that was comparatively tiny, a 16-sided cylinder about one meter (3') across and high, sitting on top of a ring of power supplies . The proposed design bears a strong resemblance to the later Cray-2 , but even shorter and smaller in diameter. With all of this power being dissipated in such

620-422: A theoretical maximum of 300 cabinets in a machine, and a design speed of 41.5 teraflops. Red Storm also included an innovative new design for network interconnects, which was dubbed SeaStar and destined to be the centerpiece of succeeding innovations by Cray. The Cray XT3 massively parallel supercomputer became a commercialized version of Red Storm, similar in many respects to the earlier T3E architecture, but, like

682-555: A true global-address space and represented a return to the T3E feature set that had been so successful with Cray Research. This product was a successful follow-on to the XT3, XT4 and XT5 products. The first multi-cabinet XE6 system was shipped in July 2010. The next generation Cascade systems were designed make use of future multicore and/or manycore processors from vendors such as Intel and Nvidia. Cascade

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744-495: A whole would be about 10 times as fast, at about 100 MFLOPS. The government made it clear that all future computer purchases would require ASCII processing. To meet this requirement, the 8600 used a 64-bit word (eight eight-bit characters) instead of the earlier 60-bit word (ten six-bit characters) used in the 6600 and 7600. As in prior designs, instructions were "stuffed" into words, with each instruction taking up either 16- or 32-bits (up from 15/30). The 8600 no longer used

806-630: The Cray CX1 system, launched in September the same year. This was a deskside blade server system, comprising up to 16 dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors, with either Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed. By 2009, the largest computer system Cray had delivered was the Cray XT5 system at National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories . This system, with over 224,000 processing cores,

868-612: The Cray S-MP , later replacing it with the Cray CS6400 . In spite of these machines being some of the most powerful available when applied to appropriate workloads, Cray was never very successful in this market, possibly due to it being so foreign to its existing market niche. CCC was building the Cray-3/SSS when it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 1995. In February 1996, Cray Research

930-677: The Cray SV1 , was launched. This was a clustered SMP vector processor architecture, developed from J90 technology. On March 2, 2000, Cray was sold to Tera Computer Company , which was renamed Cray Inc. After the Tera merger, the Tera MTA system was relaunched as the Cray MTA-2 . This was not a commercial success and shipped to only two customers. Cray Inc. also unsuccessfully badged the NEC SX-6 supercomputer as

992-511: The Cray Time Sharing System operating system, developed at United States Department of Energy national laboratories ( LANL / LLNL ), before joining the broader trend toward adoption of Unixes . Today, Cray OS is a specialized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server . A series of massively parallel computers from Thinking Machines Corporation , Kendall Square Research , Intel , nCUBE , MasPar and Meiko Scientific took over

1054-703: The Cray XK7 which supports the Nvidia Kepler GPGPU and announced that the ORNL Jaguar system would be upgraded to an XK7 (renamed Titan ) and capable of over 20 petaflops. Titan was the world's fastest supercomputer as measured by the LINPACK benchmark until the introduction of the Tianhe-2 in 2013, which is substantially faster. In 2011 Cray also announced it had been awarded the $ 188 million Blue Waters contract with

1116-605: The Origin 3000 , a MIPS -based distributed shared memory computer, introduced in 2000. However, the T3E continued in production after SGI sold the Cray business the same year. Cray Research 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

1178-556: The T3E-600 ) had a 300 MHz processor clock. Later variants, using the faster 21164A (EV56) processor, comprised the T3E-900 (450 MHz), T3E-1200 (600 MHz), T3E-1200E (with improved memory and interconnect performance) and T3E-1350 (675 MHz). The T3E was available in both air-cooled ( AC ) and liquid-cooled ( LC ) configurations. AC systems were available with 16 to 128 user PEs, LC systems with 64 to 2048 user PEs. A 1480-processor T3E-1200

1240-531: The TOP500 , which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. In 1972, the company was founded by computer designer Seymour Cray as Cray Research, Inc., and it continues to manufacture parts in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin , where Cray was born and raised. After being acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, the modern company was formed after being purchased in 2000 by Tera Computer Company , which adopted

1302-636: The United States Department of Energy 's fastest-computer-in-the-world project to build a 50 tera Flops machine for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory . Cray was sued in 2002 by Isothermal Systems Research for patent infringement. The suit claimed that Cray used ISR's patented technology in the development of the Cray X1. The lawsuit was settled in 2003. As of November 2004, the Cray X1 had

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1364-547: The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign , after IBM had pulled out of the delivery. This system was delivered in 2012 and was the largest system to date, in terms of cabinets and general-purpose x86 processors, that Cray had ever delivered. In November 2011, the Cray Sonexion 1300 Data Storage System was introduced and signaled Cray's entry into the high performance storage business. This product used modular technology and

1426-412: The main memory . To improve overall throughput, the machine could operate in a special mode that sent a single instruction to all four processors with different data. This technique, today known as SIMD , reduced the total number of memory accesses because the instruction was only read once, instead of four times. Each processor was about 2.5 times as fast as a 7600, so with all four running the machine as

1488-411: The 1980s high performance market. At first, Cray Research denigrated such approaches by complaining that developing software to effectively use the machines was difficult – a true complaint in the era of the ILLIAC IV , but becoming less so each day. Cray eventually realized that the approach was likely the only way forward and started a five-year project to capture the lead in this area: the plan's result

1550-438: The A or B registers as in previous designs, and included a set of 16 general-purpose X registers instead. A 6600/7600 Peripheral Processor system was used for I/O , largely unchanged. Some effort was made to help compatibility between the older machines and the 8600, but the change in word length made this difficult. Instead, floating point formats were retained, allowing Fortran code to port directly. In 1971, Control Data

1612-553: The CDC headquarters in Minneapolis, but grew upset by constant interruptions by managers. He eventually set up a lab in his hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin , about 85 miles to the east. Cray had a string of successes at CDC, including the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600 . When CDC ran into financial difficulties in the late 1960s, development funds for Cray's follow-on CDC 8600 became scarce. When he

1674-505: The Chippewa Lab. By 1974, the machine still didn't work correctly. Jim Thornton's competing STAR design had reached production quality at this point, and the 8600 project was then cancelled. In service STAR proved to have poor real-world performance, and when the Cray-1 entered the market in 1976, CDC was quickly pushed from the supercomputer market. An effort was made to re-enter the market in

1736-647: The Cray SX-6 and acquired exclusive rights to sell the SX-6 in the US, Canada, and Mexico. In 2002, Cray Inc. announced its first new model, the Cray X1 combined architecture vector processor / massively parallel supercomputer. Previously known as the SV2 , the X1 is the result of the earlier SN2 concept originated during the SGI years. In May 2004, Cray was announced to be one of the partners in

1798-717: The Cray XD1, which required a dedicated socket for the FPGA coprocessor. On November 13, 2006, Cray announced a new system, the Cray XMT , based on the MTA series of machines. This system combined multi-threaded processors, as used on the original Tera systems, and the SeaStar2 interconnect used by the XT4. By reusing ASICs , boards, cabinets, and system software used by the comparatively higher volume XT4 product,

1860-612: The Cray-2 project gave rise to a number of Cray-object-code compatible "Crayette" firms: Scientific Computer Systems (SCS), American Supercomputer, Supertek , and perhaps one other firm. These firms did not intend to compete against Cray and therefore attempted less expensive, slower CMOS versions of the X-MP with the release of the COS operating system (SCS) and the CFT Fortran compiler; they also considered

1922-626: The S-1 as the Cray XMS , but the machine proved problematic; meanwhile, the not-yet-completed S-2, a Y-MP clone, was later offered as the Cray Y-MP (later becoming the Cray EL90 ) which started to sell in reasonable numbers in 1991–92—to mostly smaller companies, notably in the oil exploration business. This line evolved into the Cray J90 and eventually the Cray SV1 in 1998. In December 1991, Cray purchased some of

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1984-659: The XD1, using AMD Opteron processors. On August 8, 2005, Peter Ungaro was appointed CEO. Ungaro had joined Cray in August 2003 as Vice President of Sales and Marketing and had been made Cray's President in March 2005. Introduced in 2006, the Cray XT4 added support for DDR2 memory, newer dual-core and future quad-core Opteron processors and utilized a second generation SeaStar2 communication coprocessor. It also included an option for FPGA chips to be plugged directly into processor sockets, unlike

2046-513: The acquisition of Appro International, Inc. , a California-based privately held developer of advanced scalable supercomputing solutions. As of 2012 the #3 provider on the Top100 supercomputer list, Appro builds some of the world's most advanced high performance computing (HPC) cluster systems. In 2012, Cray also opened a subsidiary in China. On September 25, 2019, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired

2108-539: The assets of Floating Point Systems , another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server market with its SPARC -based Model 500 line. These symmetric multiprocessing machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems . Cray set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the Cray Business Systems Division ) to sell this system as

2170-415: The case of the 8600. Reliability was so poor that it appeared impossible to get a whole machine working. This was not the first time this had happened: on the 6600 project Cray had to start over from scratch, and the 7600 was in production for some time before it started working reliably. In this case Cray decided the current design was a dead-end, and told William Norris (CDC's CEO) that the only way forward

2232-579: The company for $ 1.3 billion. In October 2020, HPE was awarded the contract to build the pre-exascale EuroHPC computer LUMI , in Kajaani , Finland . The contract, worth €144.5 million, is for an HPE Cray EX system, with a theoretical maximum performance of 550 petaflops . Once fully operational, LUMI will become one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. On June 28, 2022, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) inaugurated

2294-678: The cost of making the very specialized MTA system could be reduced. A second generation of the XMT is scheduled for release in 2011, with the first system ordered by the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS). In 2006, Cray announced a vision of products dubbed Adaptive Supercomputing . The first generation of such systems, dubbed the Rainier Project , used a common interconnect network (SeaStar2), programming environment, cabinet design, and I/O subsystem. These systems included

2356-456: The existing XT4 and the XMT. The second generation, launched as the XT5h , allowed a system to combine compute elements of various types into a common system, sharing infrastructure. The XT5h combined Opteron, vector, multithreaded, and FPGA compute processors in a single system. In April 2008, Cray and Intel announced they would collaborate on future supercomputer systems. This partnership produced

2418-462: The individual components. By 1971, CDC was having cash-flow problems and the design was still not coming together, prompting Cray to leave the company in 1972. The 8600 design effort was eventually canceled in 1974, and Control Data moved on to the CDC STAR-100 series instead. Cray revisited the 8600's basic design in his Cray-2 of the early 1980s. The introduction of integrated circuits solved

2480-423: The late 1980s and early 1990s, which out-competed low-end Cray machines in the market. The Convex Computer series, as well as a number of small-scale parallel machines from companies like Pyramid Technology and Alliant Computer Systems were particularly popular. One such vendor was Supertek , whose S-1 machine was an air-cooled CMOS implementation of the X-MP processor. Cray purchased Supertek in 1990 and sold

2542-597: The name Cray Inc. In 2019, the company was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $ 1.3 billion. In 1950, Seymour Cray began working in the computing field when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota . There, he helped to create the ERA 1103 . ERA eventually became part of UNIVAC , and began to be phased out. In 1960, he left the company, a few years after former ERA employees set up Control Data Corporation (CDC). He initially worked out of

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2604-545: The nation’s newest weather and climate supercomputers, two HPE Cray supercomputers installed and operated by General Dynamics (GDIT). Each supercomputer operates at 12.1 petaflops . On November 18, 2024, the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) unveiled an HPE Cray supercomputer for use in nuclear weapons analysis and inertial confinement fusion design. The supercomputer is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and

2666-427: The number of units sold was small compared to ordinary mainframes . This perception extended to countries as well: to boost the perception of exclusivity, Cray Research's marketing department had promotional neckties made with a mosaic of tiny national flags illustrating the "club of Cray-operating countries". New vendors introduced small supercomputers, known as minisupercomputers (as opposed to superminis) during

2728-421: The problems with dense packaging and liquid cooling addressed the heat issues. The Cray-2 is very similar to the 8600 both physically and conceptually. In the 1960s, computer design was based on mounting electronic components ( transistors , resistors , etc.) on circuit boards . Several boards formed a discrete logic element of the machine, known as a module . Overall machine cycle speed is strongly related to

2790-428: The same time making the computer as a whole smaller by packing the modules closer together inside the machine. Between the time the 7600 was developed and work on the 8600 began, there had been no process improvements in the components themselves, so any performance improvements had to come solely from packaging. For the new design, they used modules containing eight four-layer circuit boards about 8" by 6", resulting in

2852-581: The signal path—the length of the wiring—requiring high-speed computers to make their modules as small as possible. This was at odds with the need to make the modules themselves more complex to increase functionality. By the late 1960s, individual components had stopped getting much smaller, so to increase the complexity of the machines, the modules would have to grow. In theory, this could slow the machine down due to signalling delays. Cray aimed to solve these contradictory problems by doing both; making each module larger and crammed with many more components, while at

2914-636: The time. The first system was sold within a month for $ 8.8 million. Seymour Cray continued working, this time on the Cray-2 , though it ended up being only marginally faster than the Cray X-MP , developed by another team at the company. Cray soon left the CEO position to become an independent contractor. He started a new Very Large Scale Integration technology lab for the Cray-2 in Boulder, Colorado , Cray Laboratories , in 1979, which closed in 1982; undaunted, Cray later headed

2976-525: Was acquired by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for $ 740 million. In May 1996, SGI sold the Superservers business to Sun. Sun then turned the UltraSPARC-based Starfire project then under development into the extremely successful Sun Enterprise 10000 range of servers. SGI used several Cray technologies in its attempt to move from the graphics workstation market into supercomputing. Key among these

3038-455: Was considerably larger than the machine itself. The electronic components were likewise improved over previous designs. The main CPU circuits moved to ECL -based logic, enabling a clock speed increase to 125   MHz (8   ns cycle time) from the 7600's 36.4   MHz (27.5   ns cycle time) an increase of about four times. Main memory was also moved to an ECL implementation and the machine

3100-565: 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 original T3E (retrospectively known as

3162-464: Was dubbed Jaguar and was the fastest computer in the world as measured by the LINPACK benchmark at the speed of 1.75 petaflops until being surpassed by the Tianhe-1A in October 2010. It was the first system to exceed a sustained performance of 1 petaflops on a 64-bit scientific application. In May 2010, the Cray XE6 supercomputer was announced. The Cray XE6 system had at its core the new Gemini system interconnect. This new interconnect included

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3224-420: Was equipped with a whopping-for-the-times 256k-words (2 megabytes) standard. The design spread the memory across 64 banks for fast access at about 8 ns/word, even though the cycle time of any one bank was about 250 ns. A high-speed core memory with a 20 ns access (overall) was also designed as a backup to the semiconductor memory. Cray decided that the 8600 would include four complete CPUs sharing

3286-424: Was originally intended to unify all high-end/supercomputer product lines including the T90 into a single architecture. This goal was never achieved before SGI divested itself of the Cray business, and the SN2 name was later associated with the SN-IA or SGI Altix 3000 architecture. In October 1996, founder Seymour Cray died as a result of a traffic accident. In 1998, under SGI ownership, one new Cray model line,

3348-406: Was previously known as the OctigaBay 12K before Cray's acquisition of that company. The XD1 provided one Xilinx Virtex II Pro field-programmable gate array ( FPGA ) with each node of four Opteron processors. The FPGAs could be configured to embody various digital hardware designs and could augment the processing or input/output capabilities of the Opteron processors. Furthermore, each FPGA contains

3410-422: Was ranked at #1 in the TOP500 supercomputer list in the November 2024 edition. HPE Cray supercomputers were listed in 7 of the top 10 positions on the list, including the #1, #2, and #3 positions. CDC 8600 Development started in 1968, shortly after the release of the 7600, but the project soon started to bog down. The dense packaging of the system led to serious reliability problems and difficulty cooling

3472-657: Was scheduled to be introduced in early 2013 and designed to use the next-generation network chip and follow-on to Gemini, code named Aries . In early 2010, Cray also introduced the Cray CX1000 , a rack-mounted system with a choice of compute-based, GPU-based, or SMP-based chassis. The CX1 and CX1000 product lines were sold until late 2011. In 2011, Cray announced the Cray XK6 hybrid supercomputer. The Cray XK6 system, capable of scaling to 500,000 processors and 50 petaflops of peak performance, combines Cray's Gemini interconnect, AMD's multi-core scalar processors, and Nvidia 's Tesla GPGPU processors. In October 2012 Cray announced

3534-408: Was the Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha -based Cray T3D and Cray T3E series, which left Cray as the only remaining supercomputer vendor in the market besides NEC's SX architecture by 2000. Most sites with a Cray installation were considered members of the "exclusive club" of Cray operators. Cray computers were considered quite prestigious because Crays were extremely expensive machines, and

3596-399: Was the first supercomputer to achieve a performance of more than 1 teraflops running a computational science application, in 1998. After Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics in February 1996, development of new Alpha-based systems was stopped. While providing the -900, -1200 and -1200E upgrades to the T3E, in the long term Silicon Graphics intended Cray T3E users to migrate to

3658-422: Was the use of the Cray-developed HIPPI computer bus and details of the interconnects used in the T3 series. SGI's long-term strategy was to merge its high-end server line with Cray's product lines in two phases, code-named SN1 and SN2 (SN standing for "Scalable Node"). The SN1 was intended to replace the T3E and SGI Origin 2000 systems and later became the SN-MIPS or SGI Origin 3000 architecture. The SN2

3720-441: Was to redesign the machine from scratch. The finances of the company were dangerous, and Norris decided that he could not take the risk; Cray would have to continue with the current design. In 1972, Cray decided that he could not work under such conditions, and left CDC to form Cray Research (it was an amicable departure; Norris and other CDC staffers purchased some of the Cray Computer initial stock offering, which turned out to be

3782-411: Was told the project would have to be put "on hold" in 1972, Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research, Inc. Copying the previous arrangement, Cray kept the research and development facilities in Chippewa Falls, and put the business headquarters in Minneapolis . The company's first product, the Cray-1 supercomputer, was a major success because it was significantly faster than all other computers at

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3844-422: Was undergoing a "belt tightening" due to the cost of an ongoing lawsuit against IBM , and asked all divisions to reduce their payroll by 10%. Cray begged to Control Data to exempt his division so he could get the 8600 shipping. When Control Data refused this request, he cut his own pay to minimum wage to solve the problem. By 1972, it appeared that even Cray's legendary module design abilities were failing him in

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