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NCAR / UCAR a research site with a long association with Cray supercomputers.

Cray Machine Families, Museums / By

The National Centre for Atmospheric Research NCAR/UCAR in Colorado has a long association with Cray supercomputers. Starting in 1977 with the Cray-1 SN3 the site invested in some the best supercomputers available.  More recently a Cray Petaflop class machines will be used to explore climate research. In 2024 the site has commissioned Derecho a 19 […]

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Florida State University replace ETA-10 with Cray YMP from 1991 by Jeff Bauer

Cray YMP Model D, Books Articles etc / By

Also seen at – http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/super-users-view.html A History of Supercomputing at Florida State University Jeff Bauer (Written in early 1991) As the result of an unsolicited proposal by the Florida State University (FSU) to the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE), a collaborative agreement was initiated in late 1984 between the State of Florida, FSU, DOE

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Delayed delivery obsoleted a Cray XMP-EA SN1205 before delivery.

Cray XMP, Books Articles etc / By

This cautionary tale of how a USD10 million Cray machine was built but never delivered due to regulatory delay. Turns out it was not super-computers but more likely to be a rogue scientist that let the nuke secrets out the flask. From Wikipedia:  “In 2004, the Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a key figure in

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Cray Research systems install base in the ’90s

Cray Machine Families, Support And Service / By

This chart shows the approximate installed base of active Cray Research systems during the 1990s. The  data that shows the XMP (red) being phased out in favour of the YMP (green) and the rise of the smaller J90 and EL systems (orange and yellow) in the later 1990s. The peek system install base in 1996 being

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Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing (index)

Books Articles etc / By

Encyclopaedia of Parallel Computing David Padua – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana USA DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4 Copyright Information Springer Science+Business Media, LLC2011 Publisher Name Springer, Boston, MA Print ISBN 978-0-387-09844-9 Number Of Entries 796 This most excellent reference book is highly recommend to gain insight into the many aspects of parallel and high performance computing. Available in print

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Frontiers of Supercomputing II

Books Articles etc / By

This interesting book of conference proceedings can be read online here:  https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0f59n73z;brand=ucpress Set in ’93 being 10 years after the first Frontiers conference the talks capture the key topics during the early stages of the massively parallel processing era. Articles by Les Davis and Bo Ewald and others. Frontiers of Supercomputing II A National Reassessment

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Static can kill delicate electronics

Support And Service, Books Articles etc / By

Static can kill delicate electronics. From Cray Channels CC_V4_N4 “Cray Research’s new system test equipment focuses on quality.” The company’s newly-established in house system test facility includes a JEOL Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and a Tracor Northern Xray spectrum analyzer. The SEM and X-ray spectrum analyzer units together offer an extremely wide magnification range (10 to 180,000 times

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T90 & C90 mini movies and T3D videos

Cray-history-buckets, Videos, Cray C90, Cray T3D, Cray T90 / By

This collection of movies was distributed on a sales related CD and demonstrated some of the tasks that T90s and other Cray supercomputer systems performed. These are in Quicktime.mov format and are of low resolution which was normal for the time. Enjoy.   Mini movie Bucket or T90 and C90 Mini movies  Note: You may

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Cray Floating point numbers

Software, Books Articles etc / By

The representation of floating point numbers and the “accuracy”, repeatability and reversibility of arithmetic operations has long be a topic of discussion amongst Cray customer and scientific users. The Cray machines up to the C90 range used 64 bit Cray floating point arithmetic. When representing the long smooth curve of real numbers using digital bits

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Cray System Service snapshots 1989 and 1996 with remote support information.

Support And Service / By

When you pay a few million $£€ for a supercomputer you expect great service. Here are a couple of service snapshots:   An article about the introduction of the on-site module tester for XMP boards. From Volume 6 No 1 – Jan/Feb 1986 of Cray Interface The on site testing and repair procedures are described

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Links to Videos of Interest

Museums, Videos, Cray T3D / By

A few links to videos of interest to Cray-History visitors. Most of these are created by the Computer History Museum. What’s All This About Gallium Arsenide?, lecture by Seymour Cray at Super computing 1988 includes industry history. The CRAY T3D Massively Parallel Processing System, lecture by Stephen Nelson and Steven Oberlin Cray Research – A

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Cray press release listing

Cray-history-buckets / By

The site has a couple of collections of public press releases available here.  The first set covers 1993 to 1996 and the second set from March 2002 to Feb 2008. Lets us know if you can fill in the gaps. All documents were obtained from publicly available sources. 1993 to 1996 List CEA_ORDER.950424.txt     

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Unicos and other operating systems

Software / By

Unicos is the operating system(s) that enabled application software and users to exploit Cray hardware.  Unicos provided a Unix based envrionment with many extensions needed for systems with multiple users and a complex workloads. Unicos provided added security, resource control, programming languages, data management features as well as processing accounting. Unicos versions (from Wikipedia) Cray

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Cray Software Applications

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Cray Research focused on hardware but also made system and application software. Customers like to buy “a solution to a problem” and are rarely fussed by the actual technology used to deliver that solution. Alongside the need for developing language and systems software unique to the special Cray Hardware application software was developed. By having

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