Frontiers of Supercomputing II

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

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

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

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.

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

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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Unicos and other operating systems

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

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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EL and C90 Poster Centerfolds

These two posters appeared side by side in Cray Channels V13_N4 as centre folds. Also distributed as wall posters. These two machines, at the opposite ends of the Cray performance spectrum, nevertheless less ran the same UNICOS operating systems and compiler environments. The EL often appeared at larger Cray sites acting as a software development

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