Cray Inc. is an enterprise, which was created 1972 under the name Cray Research of Seymour Cray.

The enterprise manufactures supercomputers, whose arithmetic performance lies today in the TFLOPS range (1 TFLOPS = 1012 floating decimal point calculations per second).

Their first supercomputer Cray supplied 1976 with the Cray-1, to a computer with with the output of 160 MFLOPS. The Cray-1 had a word size of 64 bits and a memory development of one million words, which corresponds to a memory capacity of 8 megabyte. The cycle time amounted to 12.5 nanoseconds, according to for the time at that time an enormously high clock frequency of 80MHz.

Into the center of the 80's Cray manufactured excluding array processors. The speed of these computers lies neither in their clock frequency nor in the interconnection justified by several CCUs. Instead the CCU possesses several vector registers, which can at one time take up 64 values in the case of Cray. With several vector registers instructions on 64 values can be implemented at the same time within a clock cycle.

Seymour Cray opposed long time the introduction of multiprocessor capabilities; according to its opinion were a particular, for it however very fast CCU superior to several slower CCUs. Limited multiprocessor capabilities were only introduced with the successor of the Cray-1, the Cray X-MP, which supported up to four CCUs.

The first substantial-solid computer of Cray, the Cray T3D, was delivered 1993. The T3D developed on the alpha processor of DEC and supported up to 2048 processors. The CCUs of the T3D and the successor T3E were interconnected in the topology of a 3D-Torus.

Cray delivered the operating system Unicos starting from the Cray-2, a Unix compatible time sharing operating system. In this way the users on the supercomputer could work in an environment, which was familiar them of their Desktop workstations.

In co-operation with Sun Microsystems Cray developed the Cray CS6400, a system with up to 64 SuperSPARC CCUs, which could be divided dynamically into several partitions. The CS6400 was one of the first substantial-parallel systems, which used a standard operating system (in this case Solaris) and thereby also for the employment for applications of business was suitable.

The first Cray machines were manufactured in germanium semiconductor technology. Due to the high waste heat by coolant durchflossene aluminum blocks were wedged directly to the plates. Later machines (among other things the Cray-2, Cray-3, Cray-4 and Cray T90) were immersion-cooled: The printed circuit boards swam in a bath from fluorine inert (Perfluorcarbon), an electrically non conductive coolant. A well-known quotation states that Cray is strictly speaking a company for refrigerators.

Physical requirements of a supercomputer dictated also different parts of the Design. So the uniform length of the cable connections between the individual printed circuit boards had to be kept exactly, in order to guarantee the correct Timing with the Cray-1. The solution was a housing in the Design of a column also outward turned group of round seats: The column contained the printed circuit boards, while the seat accommodated the refrigerators. The Cray-2 was likewise built in column form, in order to guarantee minimum ways between the individual components of the computer. These features made Cray the cult, a Cray machine were simply different.

1996 fused Cray Research with SGI. In March 2000 Cray Research was sold to the Tera computer corporation, those, after the sales was final on 4 April 2000, in Cray Inc. one renamed. Since then supercomputers under the name Cray are repaired.

A Cray XT3, which was developed in the past six months on a speed of 36,19 TFLOPS, occupies at present (conditions: November 2005) Place 6 the Top 500-Liste von Supercomputern. The same system still was with a speed of 15,25 TFLOPS in June 2005 on place 10.

The technology of Cray found entrance into a number of the high-performance computers of other manufacturers. To improve SGI used Cray technology around the high-speed connections for the Origin 3000, for the Origin2000. With these connections in the Origin 3000 up to 2048 processors to one ccNUMA system are coupled. That the connections of the 1996 imported Origin2000 were called CrayLink were pure marketing, SGI had Cray Research straight only acquired.

The technology of the Cray CS6400 was developed further by Sun Microsystems and forms the basis of the Sun E10000.

See also

Cray-1, Cray-2, Cray-3, Cray-4

Related links

• http://www.cray.com - official homepage (English)
• http://www.cray-cyber.org

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