A Supercomputing Journey Inspired by Curiosity

FIRST CUSTOMER: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

FUN FACT: The Ford Motor Company was the first commercial customer for the Cray C90 system.

TECH STORY: First named the Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputer, the parallel vector system had 16 new CPUs capable of 1 gigaflops each and 2 gigabytes of central memory. It could perform 5 times faster than Cray’s previous best. One of its most significant architectural features was a dual-vector pipeline allowing each of the CPUs to deliver two vector results per functional unit every clock period.

CUSTOMER FACT: Booked orders for 55 systems in its first year alone

FUN FACT: The Cray Y-MP EL system was the first supercomputer Cray Research ever sold into the financial services industry and in Eastern Europe.

TECH STORY: The Y-MP EL supercomputer lowered the cost of entry for customers. It could be configured with up to four processors and 1,042 megabytes of memory. It was air cooled, compact and easily powered. And with balanced memory and I/O bandwidth, the Y-MP EL offered the highest throughput performance available at its price point. It was later developed into the EL90 series.

FIRST CUSTOMER: AT&T Bell Labs

FUN FACT: The Cray M90 supercomputer offered up to 125 times more memory capacity than the original Y-MP system.

TECH STORY: The Cray M90 supercomputer series (originally called the Y-MP M90) was a large-memory variant of the Cray Y-MP system. Implemented in DRAM technology, it came in two-, four-, or eight-processor configurations with up to 4 billion words of memory. It allowed users to tackle huge problems without breaking them up and running them separately.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

FUN FACT: NASA mission planners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used a T3D system to explore the best places to land a spacecraft on Mars.

TECH STORY: The Cray T3D supercomputer was Cray’s first massively parallel processing system and the world’s first scalable heterogeneous one. It was designed, developed, manufactured and delivered in just 26 months. The T3D connected a massively parallel array of microprocessors made by Digital Equipment Corporation to a Cray designed vector processor and was available in sizes from 32 to 2,084 processors.

CUSTOMER FACT: Booked 37 advance orders prior to announcement

FUN FACT: The J90 series was Cray’s fastest-selling product ever with more than 170 systems sold in its first year – 40% of them to first-time Cray buyers.

TECH STORY: The J90 series was a scalable, lower-cost system that came in eight-, 16-, and 32-processor configurations. It achieved 10 to 20 times the bandwidth of competing systems and better price/performance by reducing the complexity of the CPUs and using low-cost and high-speed advanced CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor chips). Prices for the systems started at $225,000.

CUSTOMER FACT: Booked eight advance orders prior to announcement

FUN FACT: The T90 system was the world’s first wireless supercomputer. Using a pioneering device that connected the processor modules to memory, Cray eliminated all internal wiring. (For comparison, the largest C90 system had 36 miles of it.)

TECH STORY: The successor to the C90 line, the parallel vector processing Cray T90 series was available with one to 32 processors and provided up to 60 gigaflops of performance. It replaced interconnect wires with electrically activated zero-insertion-force (eZIF) connectors with 400 signal contacts each.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

FUN FACT: The Cray T3E was the world’s first supercomputer to sustain 1 teraflops on a real-world application. By 1997, T3E systems held 14 of the top 20 spots on the list of the world’s top supercomputers.

TECH STORY: The T3E was unrivalled at efficiently and cost effectively scaling from tens to thousands of processors. What made it different was that every part of the system scaled with the number of processors – interprocessor communication, operating system, I/O and memory.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Alabama Supercomputer Authority

FUN FACT: The Ford Motor Company purchased five Cray SV1 supercomputers, making it the system’s top customer.

TECH STORY: The SV1 scalable vector system featured processors with a peak performance of four gigaflops, single cabinet nodes with a peak performance up to 32 gigaflops, and system clustering tools that combined to produce a supercomputer capable of 1 teraflops. It introduced innovations such as the world’s first vector cache memory. And it beat its competition on price/ performance by 8 times.

FIRST CUSTOMER: U.S. Department of Defense

FUN FACT: Cray® X1 processors ran so hot, engineers innovated an evaporative spray technology to keep the modules from overheating.

TECH STORY: The Cray X1 system fused the processor performance of vector systems with the scalability of massively parallel processing – a feat long-considered impossible. High-performance interconnect and memory subsystems allowed the X1 system to scale to 4,096 processors and a peak performance of 50 teraflops. A major upgrade, the X1E tripled the peak performance and compute density.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Sandia National Laboratories

FUN FACT: Cray broke the petaflops barrier with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s XT5 “Jaguar” system (pictured). Jaguar had 200 cabinets, 224,256 processing cores, and at 1.759 petaflops was the world’s fastest from 2009 to 2010. 

TECH STORY: Cray developed the technology that would become the Cray® XT™ series in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories. The massively parallel XT used a Cray-designed interconnect, was air-cooled and could scale from a single cabinet to hundreds.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

FUN FACT: A Georgia Tech researcher used PNNL’s Cray® XMT™ system to identify Twitter’s most influential users in 2009. The machine chewed through a day’s worth of tweets from its ~18 million users in an hour.

TECH STORY: The Cray XMT system was a scalable, massively multithreaded platform with a shared memory architecture ideally suited for large-scale data analysis and data mining. The design was based on a Cray XT compute blade but used custom Cray Threadstorm chips. A single Threadstorm processor could sustain 128 simultaneous threads.

CUSTOMER FACT: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) received the first beta system.

FUN FACT: Scientists using CSCS’s Cray® XE6™ system solved a 300-year-old riddle about why Earth’s magnetic field keeps moving west. Hint: It’s the core.

TECH STORY: The XE6 supercomputer took the XT series infrastructure and incorporated multicore AMD processors and the breakthrough Cray Gemini interconnect. Gemini delivered extreme messaging rates and much improved latency. The XE6 could scale to over 1 million processor cores and could exceed 10 petaflops.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

FUN FACT: Cray® XK™ system “Titan” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (pictured) topped the world’s fastest list in 2012. It stayed among the top 10 for the next seven years. In 2019, ORNL named a Cray® Shasta™ system “Frontier” as a successor to Titan.

TECH STORY: The Cray XK series combined the Gemini interconnect, AMD multicore scalar processors and NVIDIA many-core GPUs to create a true hybrid supercomputer. The system was capable of scaling to 500,000 processors and more than 30 petaflops.

FIRST CUSTOMER: High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (pictured)

FUN FACT: Rolled out in 2016, the XC50 supercomputer could deliver 1 petaflop of peak performance in a single cabinet. By comparison, the first Cray system to break the petaflops barrier had 200 cabinets.

TECH STORY: Scalable to 500 petaflops, Cray® XC™ systems merged scalar processing, co-processing and accelerator technology in a single, highly scalable machine. It also introduced the Aries interconnect which delivered substantial improvements across all metrics and solved the challenge of providing cost-effective, scalable global bandwidth.

CUSTOMER FACT: The first Cray® Urika® product had several early adopters including the Institute of Systems Biology, Mayo Clinic, Noblis and Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.

FUN FACT: Urika was initially spelled uRiKA. It stood for Universal RDF Integration Knowledge Appliance.

TECH STORY: The first Urika product was built for a graph-based approach to big data relationship analytics. It used Cray Threadstorm massively multithreaded processors and a massive shared memory architecture. Later called the Urika-GD, it was joined by the Urika-XA extreme analytics and Urika-GX agile analytics platforms.

CUSTOMER FACT: Railway Technical Research Institute was the first publicly announced customer for the CS series.

FUN FACT: What do Shadow, Ollie, BeBop and Nurion have in common? Hint: They’re not pet dogs. They’re a few of the CS series systems that have made the TOP500 supercomputer list. Nurion made it all the way to number 11 in 2018.

TECH STORY: The Cray® CS™ series cluster supercomputers featured the latest in processing, networking and cooling technologies while also being highly customisable for compute, data and hybrid workloads. The series’ final iteration – the CS500 system – could scale to over 60 petaflops.

FIRST CUSTOMER: U.S. Government

FUN FACT: When the Cray® CS-Storm™ system launched in 2014, it was the world’s most dense GPU system.

TECH STORY: Based on the CS series architecture, the CS-Storm supercomputer was built for GPU-accelerated workloads. A single, high-density rack delivered up to 980 teraflops of double-precision performance. The system is well-suited to accelerate computing workloads such as machine and deep learning, reservoir simulation and geospatial intelligence.

FIRST CUSTOMER: Argonne National Laboratory

FUN FACT: An exascale HPE Cray supercomputer is 6 billion times faster than the Cray-1.

TECH STORY: The HPE Cray supercomputer is built for exascale-era workloads. It supports a diversity of processor technologies, supports converged workloads, eliminates the distinction between supercomputers and clusters, and fuses HPC and AI workloads with the productivity of the cloud. The revolutionary HPE Slingshot interconnect serves as its backbone. The US’s first three exascale supercomputers are all HPE Cray systems.