The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer, which of Cray Inc. one developed, one built and one sold. It was the parallel vector processor supported computers of the company and represented to 1982 the successor of the 1976 published Cray-1. It was from 1983 to 1985 the fastest computer of the world. The chief developer was Steve Chen.

Description

The X-MP continued the "“horseshoe"” - principle of the earlier computers and looked from the outside nearly identical. The processors ran in 10 nanoseconds a clock (compared with 12,5 LV of the Cray-1A), which a theoretical arithmetic performance of 200 Megaflops per processor and a total output of 800 Megaflops for the four-processor machine made possible. Also the processors had an improved support for concatenated computations, parallel arithmetic pipelines and access to divided memory over several Pipes.

On this system the ran Cray operating system at the beginning of (COS) whereby UniCOS (an UNIX system V descendant) over guest operating system a possibility to be implemented could. UniCOS became starting from 1984 the main operating system.

Equipment

The X-MP was sold with one, two or five processors and one to sixteen Megaword (8-128MiB) main storage. While the memory was limited at first on 16 Megaword by a 24-bit ADDRESS register, the later XMP/EA memory architecture extended the usable memory to theoretical 2 Gigaword - the largest ever in practice manufactured memory amounted to however only 64 Megaword. The XMP/EA had a clocking of 8,5 LV, which made a theoretical maximum output possible of 942 Megaflops. 1982 cost a X-MP/48 around the 15 million US Dollar, not counted the costs of memory cards.

Successor

1985 were introduced the Cray-2 with a completely new architecture. With of the X-MP very deviating compact four-processor main storage it should reach architecture and 512MiB to 4GiB up to 500 Megaflops according to specification, was however slower with some computations than the X-MP, since their memory exhibited very large latencies (1986 was measured with a standardized LINPACK test of a X-MP/48 a speed of 713 Megaflops).

The follow-up series of the X-MP, which became Cray Y-MP, starting from 1988 sold; it was not an evolutionary development of the X-MP with a capacity of to sixteen of the processors changed in their architecture much.

See also

Articles in category "Cray X-MP"

We found here 9 articles.

Related Websites

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• Cray X-MP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  An NSA CRAY X-MP/24, on exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum ... Cray Research continually enhanced the X-MP over the years. ...


• CRAY X-MP/48
  The CRAY X-MP/48 was delivered to NCAR in October 1986, replacing the second CRAY-1A. The basic cost of the computer was $14.6 million, plus $3.5 million ...


• Cray X-MP: Information From Answers.com
  Cray X-MP The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research . The company's first parallel vector processor machine and a.


• Cray XMP
  Slide 65 of 89. Notes:. In 1985 almost a decade after the Cray 1, Cray Research introduced the 4 processor XMP.


• Cray-Cyber - Guide to Vectorization/Parallelization
  There is no principal difference between the very first parallel vector machine, the Cray-XMP, and the most modern Cray-X1 in this respect. ...


• Two Cray X/MP papers
  In the later 1980s I spent much time working around Cray equipment, in particular an X-MP/24. This page has links to two papers written at the time. ...