Cray Inc. Company (Unicos)

549 words [ 10 Versions ] [ 1 Weblinks ] - Last update: 2023-12-22 Page created: 2004-04-03 [SB]

 


Cray Company history

Website 2007 Since 1951 Seymour Cray (1925-09-28 to 1996-09-05) was mainly and with great engagement engaged in the development of high-performance computers. The main field during the development of such complex systems is on the integration of new technology, the physical construction and continuous increase of the performance. Seymour Cray worked before at the company Control Data Corporation (CDC) founded by William C. Norris in 1957. Seymour Cray designed the CDC 6600 computer system there. Seymour Cray founded his own company Cray Research in 1972, supported financially by CDC.

In 1989 Cray leaves the research institute Cray Research and founds the Cray Computer Corp. in Colorado. There he developed another Cray supercomputers like the Cray C90. Cray started again a company named with his initials as SRC Computer where his last project Cray 5 is developed. Seymour Cray went into history as "father of supercomputing". Jim Rottsolk led now this company as president and CEO. He had co-founded the Tera company in 1987. Peter J. Ungaro led the company Cray since 2005.

The field of applications for supercomputer is enormous. It is be the simulation of productional processes, vehicles, research of material deformations, the observation of global climate changes, bio chemical reactions and process, computing of molecules or complex data structures - everywherewhere in science and development all of the available performance is needed.

Each new Cray supercomputer generation was developed further. So a own cooling system with the name Freon was designed in order to derive the high thermal power of the components. The development of the design of Cray supercomputers is just as noteworthy. Some models are built up like a ring and almost are enclosed in the outer ring of a seat group. With the Cray XMS system Cray has designed her first mini-supercomputer which was taken off by the more Cray J90 later. The Cray Y-MP system has reached a total performance of up to 2.3 GFLOP together with several CPUs and each 333 MFLOP in 1988. In 1993 Cray Research introduces her first massive parallel system (MPP), the Cray T3D supercomputer. The first cordless supercomputer was introduced with Cray T90 in 1994.

SGI bought the company Cray Research for 740 million dollars in February 1996. SGI hived off the Cray Research enterprise division in August 1999. This enterprise division was sold from SGI to Tera under heavy financial loss in March 2000. Cray research was renamed in Cray Inc. Some patents of Cray remain at SGI.
In 2004 the startup enterprise OctigaBay Systems Corp. with experiences in High performance computing was bought by Cray. The design is optimized on MPP and does not have any performance bottlenecks like typical in other systems. With the take-over the Cray XD1 system was published later with the new technique.

Operating Systems
- UNICOS: scalable Microkernel operating system for small servers up to supercomputers
- UNICOS/mk: scalable Microkernel operating system for strongly parallel computer systems like Cluster
- UNICOS/lc: developed for complex applications, can scale up to 30,000 processors, consists of a Microkernel for the computing nodes and an operating system for the service nodes, cluster file system with transfer rates of up to 100 gbyte/s

On 2009-03-18 Cray published the new midrange supercomputer XT5m for massively parallel processing (MPP).

 



Versions

Date - Version
1976 - Cray-1, one single Vector processor, 8 mbyte RAM, new design, 160 MFLOP performance
1982 - Cray X-MP, first multi processor supercomputer
1985 - Cray-2, high memory deploy, 488 MFLOP per CPU
1991 - Cray C90, max. 16 CPUs with each 1 GFLOP performance, max. 2 gbyte RAM
1993 May - Cray-3, CPU with 500 MHz, this model was never sold
1995 - Cray-4, 64 CPUs, 1 ghz CPU, this model was never produced
-- - Cray-5 was planned
-- - Cray-6 was planned
1998 Aug. - Cray T3E AC, 28 CPUs, 5 gbyte RAM, 16,8 GFLOP
2002 Nov. - Cray X1, 10^15 calculations per second

Weblinks

[ cray ]