From: misha@ai.mit.edu (Mike Bolotski) Subject: Cray Y-MP C90 Date: 20 Nov 91 18:39:07 GMT Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Reply-To: misha@ai.mit.edu Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu type: NYT (Copyright 1991 The New York Times) date: 11-19-91 2118EST category: Financial subject: BC CRAY COMPUTER author: JOHN MARKOFF Even as Cray Research Inc. introduced its most powerful supercomputer yet on Tuesday, industry executives and scientists said the machine marked the end of an era for a class of computers pioneered in the 1970s by the company's founder, Seymour Cray. The newest Cray Research supercomputer, the Y-MP C90, uses up to 16 processors and can compute at four times the speed of the most powerful systems now marketed by the Eagan, Minn., company. Unlike the supercomputers from which Cray Research is facing increasing competition, the new machine is not a massively parallel computer. Such machines, based on hundreds and even thousands of inexpensive microprocessors, are achieving breakthroughs on many scientific and engineering problems, and Cray itself has said that it is at work on a massively parallel system. Cray, who left Cray Research in 1989 to found a new company, Cray Computer, is a legendary designer of supercomputers that are based on several streamlined processors that excel at the computations required by scientists and engineers. This kind of computing, known as vector processing, can perform arrays of similar types of calculations at lightning speeds. But new software advances, permitting problems to be broken up automatically into pieces that are computed in parallel, are shifting the speed balance toward the newer massively parallel computers being designed by such companies as Intel Supercomputers, Thinking Machines, Masspar and NCube, among others. Even so, Cray Research still has the largest share of the supercomputer market. Last year the company had sales of $804.3 million, and it has now installed 827 machines worldwide. Industry analysts said that if Cray Research came to market quickly with its new massively parallel computer, scheduled for 1993, it might be able to hold on to much of its current installed base by offering compatible software. As for the newly introduced vector computer, the C90, Cray Research said that it had six or seven orders for the machine, which costs $30.5 million. All supercomputer makers must contend with tighter government and corporate budgets for the machines. At Cray, cutbacks in United States military spending have recently shifted the balance of its sales; systems sold for environmental applications like weather prediction now represent the company's largest sales category. (STORY CAN END HERE; OPTIONAL ADD FOLLOWS.) The new C90 may make its biggest market impact on other traditional supercomputer makers, including Cray Computer and Supercomputer Systems Inc., another Cray Research spinoff, which was started by Steven Chen, a computer designer. New machines from both companies have been significantly delayed by technical snags. Cray is attempting to build a supercomputer based on chips made of gallium arsenide, which is more difficult to work with than the conventional silicon used in Cray Research's systems. Chen's company, which is being supported by International Business Machines Corp., is more than a year and a half late with its product and has lost several prospective customers, according to industry executives. But the secretive National Security Agency, which is Supercomputing Systems' biggest potential customer, is said to remain committed to the new system. *** End of Article *** -- Mike Bolotski MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory misha@ai.mit.edu Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 253-8170 From: hdp@flyer.ncsc.org (Hugh D. Patrick) Subject: Cray Research announces the Y-MP C90 Date: 20 Nov 91 16:56:42 GMT Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson) Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu [ This is from the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. Hugh Patrick is the Cray rep serving NCSC--steve ] CRAY RESEARCH UNVEILS NEW TOP-OF-THE-LINE SUPERCOMPUTER FOR THE 90s, WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL CRAY Y-MP C90 System Sets New Industry Performance Standards on Real-World Work EAGAN, Minn., November 19, 1991 -- Cray Research, Inc. (NYSE: CYR) introduced today the world's most powerful parallel vector computer system, the CRAY Y-MP C90 supercomputer. The new system has 16 central processing units (CPUs), and on actual customer problems, operates five times the speed of Cray Research's previous fastest supercomputers. The CRAY Y- MP C90 system, announced earlier today at a news conference in Tokyo and unveiled at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Supercomputing '91 conference in Albuquerque, is the most powerful general-purpose supercomputer ever offered for scientific and engineering applications. The CRAY Y-MP C90 system, fully binary-compatible with the company's recently broadened CRAY Y-MP product line, features an all-new CPU with a peak performance of one billion floating- point operations per second (Gflop/s). With 16 of these powerful CPUs and 256 megawords (2 gigabytes) of central memory, the CRAY Y-MP C90 system has a peak performance of 16 Gflop/s. "This powerful system will help change the world," said John Rollwagen, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer. "The CRAY Y-MP C90 will enable scientists and engineers to solve some of the world's most complex and critical problems (Grand Challenges) that, until now, couldn't be solved with available computational tools. In addition, this system will open exciting new computational avenues for solving critical commercial challenges." "The new supercomputer has achieved exceptional, sustained performance rates on a broad-range of user application codes. We have run initial benchmarks on the most popular third- party software codes and the results have been outstanding. In fact, one large weather model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ran on one C90 CPU two and one-half times faster than on one CRAY Y-MP CPU. We anticipate this model to perform on the full system at a sustained rate of four to five Gflop/s, compared to the previous high speed of less than one Gflop/s on our eight- processor CRAY Y-MP system." Rollwagen said that the most important measurement of system performance is its ability to do real work. The CRAY Y- MP C90 system is able to achieve and maintain exceptional speeds on popular software codes that today are applied to a broad range of sciences. In addition, the CRAY Y-MP C90 system delivers its speed with the production-tested UNICOS family of compilers, tools, libraries, and applications, allowing existing programs to be used unchanged. Scientists and engineers of the new system can immediately apply its performance to their tasks without re-engineering their software. This will enable these users to make new breakthroughs, enhance their insights and knowledge, investigate problems that couldn't be considered in the past, and shorten time-to-market for new products. "Today also marks a milestone for our network supercomputing strategy," Rollwagen said. "We have fulfilled our promise to deliver, by the end of 1991, a full spectrum of high- performance computing systems that support industry standards and can be integrated easily into customers' heterogeneous computing environments. Our full spectrum of products is topped by the CRAY Y-MP C90 system, the most powerful, general-purpose supercomputer today." Rollwagen noted that network supercomputing increases productivity by optimizing workload distribution in customers' distributed processing networks. With Cray Research's expanded product line, which now includes the CRAY Y-MP EL system (an entry-level system announced last month) the company implemented a new performance measurement called Relative Processor Performance (RPP), based on the performance of a single CRAY Y-MP CPU. Today's announcement extends the performance scalability of binary-compatible, UNIX-based CRAY Y-MP platforms to more than two orders of magnitude of performance, ranging from the CRAY Y-MP EL system providing .2 to .9 RPP, to the CRAY Y-MP C90 system delivering from 32 to 40 RPPs. CUSTOMER INTEREST Cray Research already has received seven orders and one letter- of-intent for the powerful CRAY Y-MP C90 system, and demand for the new system has filled the production schedule for the next 12 months. The full 16-CPU system has been running at Cray Research since October, and customer shipments are expected to begin in January 1992. The first international installation of the CRAY Y-MP C90 system will be at ECMWF in Reading, England. "We placed our order for the CRAY Y-MP C90 system some time ago and have been looking forward to taking advantage of the additional power and capabilities of the new system to improve the accuracy of our medium-range (10-day) weather forecast," said Dr. David Burridge, director of ECMWF. "We are very excited about the five-fold speedup on the initial benchmark of our 10-day weather forecast model. And our scientists and analysts are enthusiastic about installing our new CRAY Y-MP C90 system and achieving comparable, possibly even higher, sustained speeds on our operational forecasting model." Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center (FNOC), the U.S. Navy's primary numerical processing center for global atmospheric and oceanographic predictions, will install a CRAY Y-MP C90 system in fourth quarter 1992 at its computer center in Monterey, Calif. The system will be the principal computational resource for the Primary Oceanographic Prediction System (POPS), a Navy program designed to provide air-ocean prediction capabilities of greater resolution and accuracy than that possible with previous computer resources. "The power, memory, and throughput capabilities of the CRAY Y- MP C90 system will allow us to run the large and very complex scientific models that couple the ocean and atmosphere," said Randy Nottenkamper, POPS site manager for FNOC. "With today's computer resources, we model the atmosphere and ocean separately. This new class of machine will enable us to model the air and ocean as the single continuous medium it is in nature, and thereby produce more accurate environmental products for the U.S. Navy and other U.S. DOD forces worldwide." The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), one of four National Science Foundation (NSF) Centers, has also placed an order for the new system. PSC will be the first non- government lab in the U.S. to receive the CRAY Y-MP C90 system. "We at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are taking another step forward in technology leadership with the acquisition of Cray Research's Y-MP C90 system," said Michael Levine, Ph.D., scientific director of PSC. "We were the first non-government lab to receive the company's previous generation Y-MP8 and to make its capabilities available to the national research community. We are excited to be able to repeat this achievement once again with the CRAY Y-MP C90 system to bring this most powerful scientific computing system to American researchers. "Working with our users, our goal is to solve significant scientific and engineering problems. We are confident that the power and applicability of the C90 system will enable our users to master important challenges essential to our national scientific leadership and competitiveness." PARALLEL POWER The CRAY Y-MP C90 system uses a balanced parallel, vector- scalar architecture to maximize sustained performance. "The C90 system provides the highest level of memory and aggregate I/O bandwidth available in any computer system in the world today," said Les Davis, chief technical officer for Cray Research. One of the most significant architectural features of the CRAY Y-MP C90 system is a dual-vector pipeline that allows each of the system's 16 CPUs to deliver two vector results per functional unit every clock period, said Davis. With its 64- way parallelism and efficient multiprocessing capabilities, the CRAY Y-MP C90 system can deliver a total of 64 vector results per clock period, or four times that of Cray Research's previous top-end systems, he added. "The CRAY Y-MP C90 system has real and usable `parallel power,'" said Davis. "The system's multiprocessor hardware capabilities, dual-vector pipeline feature, and proven, production-tested multitasking software, make it easy to apply the parallel power of this system to today's most widely used application codes. The CRAY Y-MP C90 efficiently handles scalar, short vector, long vector, parallel, and highly parallel problems." The CRAY Y-MP C90 system, like all CRAY Y-MP products, operates Cray Research's feature-rich UNICOS operating system and the CF77 Fortran, Cray Standard C, Cray Ada, and Pascal compilers. The new system supports the complete CRAY Y-MP library of more than 1,000 application codes covering nearly every scientific and engineering discipline. Cray Research, Inc. designs, manufactures, markets, and supports high-performance computer systems for scientific and engineering applications. ### Editor's Note: Attached are more specific details of the CRAY Y-MP C90 system features and a glossary of computer terms. The CRAY Y-MP C90 model is on display at the Cray Research booth at the Supercomputing '91 conference at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque from Nov. 19 - 22. CRAY Y-MP C90 SYSTEM FEATURES o Autotasking, a Cray Research software product that portions a problem and distributes it across the system's multiple CPUs, provides automatic parallel processing. o Full complement of production system software and industry standard applications available today. o Four double-width memory ports per CPU and more than 250 gigabytes/sec. of memory bandwidth help deliver more sustained computing power to the user. o With up to 16 I/O clusters, aggregate I/O bandwidth of over 13 gigabytes/sec., and the ability to directly attach more than four terabytes of disk storage, the CRAY Y-MP C90 is the most powerful and versatile computer system in the industry. Powerful I/O software further enhances the system's I/O capabilities. o An optional Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) provides very high-speed secondary memory with up to 2,048 megawords (16 gigabytes) of storage capacity. With a bandwidth of 7,200 megabytes/sec to the mainframe, the SSD allows users to solve large problems in less time. GLOSSARY OF TERMS AUTOTASKING -- A Cray Research software product that portions a problem and distributes it among the system's processors for more parallel problem solving. BINARY COMPATIBLE -- Refers to compatibility of computers; it's when no software changes must be applied to an actual application in order to run the application on another machine. This is in contrast with "source compatibility," where programs must be re-compiled. Binary compatibility enables all software to be accepted and run across all computer systems in the full CRAY Y-MP product line. CENTRAL PROCESSING UNITS (CPU) -- Computer hardware where the actual computation takes place. CPUs originally were referred to as the element that both issued and executed computer instructions. The interpretation has changed, especially with respect to Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel machines, where the "CPUs" do not actually issue an instruction. CLOCK PERIOD -- The time in which a computer runs through one complete cycle. Usually measured in nanoseconds (one billionth of a second). Some computers have a "major" and "minor" clock period where some special instructions cycle in a shorter minor clock period, but the shortest time in which the entire machine cycles is the major clock period. DUAL-VECTOR PIPELINE -- A functional unit that produces two results per clock period. A single vector pipeline generally produces one result per clock period. FLOATING-POINT OPERATIONS PER SECOND -- The rate of computations for decimal arithmetic computations. The technical abbreviation is flop/s, but it is often incorrectly used as "FLOPS." GENERAL-PURPOSE -- A computer designed to operate on a program of instructions for the purpose of solving a wide variety of data processing problems, rather than being designed to fulfill a single function or type of function. General-purpose computers use general-purpose operating systems and languages. They do not rely on proprietary languages and unique extensions. GIGAFLOP/s or GFLOP/s -- One billion floating-point operations per second. A measure of computational speed. HIGHLY PARALLEL -- Program characteristics with an unusually large number of independent (parallel) tasks. Generally refers to one thousand or more parallel tasks. LONG VECTOR -- Program characteristic with an extremely long vector. Generally refers to vectors in length of more than 1,000. MEGAWORD -- Measure of computer memory capacity. One megaword is equivalent to eight million bytes. MULTITASKING -- A methodology in multi-user systems that incorporates multiple interconnected CPUs. It lets users run their programs simultaneously (in parallel) because each user has a CPU, and shares resources such as memory, storage devices, and printers. This word can often be used interchangeably with "parallel processing." NETWORK SUPERCOMPUTING -- The use of computational elements, distributed on a computer network, to solve a single problem. PARALLEL -- The internal handling of instructions and/or data in groups, all elements of a group being handled simultaneously. When the word parallel is used to describe a computer this means a computer in which the computation is handled concurrently by separate units of the computer. The units may be interconnected in different ways as determined by the computation. RELATIVE PROCESSOR PERFORMANCE (RPP) -- Performance measure based on the relative power of computers. The Cray Research RPP is based on the computation power of one CRAY Y-MP CPU. SCALAR -- Non-vector. "Scalar" often refers to floating point or integer computation that is not vectorized, but more generally it also refers to logical and conditional (jump) computation. Vectorized code that does not amortize start-up time for computation. That is, scalar refers to computation not involving a specific vectorizable independence. SHORT VECTOR -- "Short vector" typically refers to vector lengths less than 50 or 100. VECTOR -- Construct in applications have a specific parallel and allow computation by vector processors. Vector processing is a special case of parallel processing and is similar to some forms of (SIMD) parallelism. VECTOR-SCALAR -- Calculations involving both vector and scalar computation. From: hdp@flyer.ncsc.org (Hugh D. Patrick) Subject: PSC orders CRAY Y-MP C90 Date: 20 Nov 91 16:57:41 GMT Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson) Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu [ This is from the North Carolina Supercomputing Center. Hugh Patrick is the Cray rep serving NCSC--steve ] PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER ORDERS NEW CRAY Y-MP C90 SYSTEM, MOST POWERFUL GENERAL-PURPOSE COMPUTER SYSTEM IN WORLD Organization Will Be The First National Academic Research Center To Receive New System EAGAN, Minn., November 20, 1991 -- The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has ordered Cray Research's new CRAY Y-MP C90 system, the most powerful general-purpose computer system available in the world, the Eagan-based supercomputer company announced today. The new supercomputer will replace an eight-processor CRAY Y-MP system, the company's previous fastest computer, and will be installed in fourth quarter of 1992. The center will be the first academic research center to receive the CRAY Y-MP C90 system. "We at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are taking another step forward in technology leadership with the acquisition of Cray Research's Y-MP C90 system," said Michael Levine, Ph.D., scientific co-director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "We were the first academic research center to receive the company's previous generation Y-MP8 and to make its capabilities available to the national research community. We are excited to be the first national academic research center able to receive a CRAY Y-MP C90 system to bring this most powerful proven scientific computing system to American researchers." The new CRAY Y-MP C90 system, announced by Cray Research yesterday at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Supercomputing '91 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a six-fold peak performance increase over the company's previous fastest computer. According to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the new supercomputer is expected to spur fresh approaches by researchers nationwide who use the center's computing resources to address some of the most challenging science and engineering problems. "This powerful system will help change the world," said John Rollwagen, Cray Research chairman and chief executive officer. "We are delighted to have our latest technology, and most powerful computer system, introduced to the academic research community by the Pittsburgh center. The CRAY Y-MP C90 will enable the center's scientists and engineers to solve some of the world's most complex and critical problems (Grand Challenges) that, until now, couldn't be solved with available computational tools. In addition, this system will open exciting new computational avenues for solving critical commercial challenges as well." Working with its users, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's goal is to solve significant scientific and engineering problems. "We are confident that the power and applicability of the C90 system will enable our users to master important challenges essential to our national scientific leadership and competitiveness," said Levine. The CRAY Y-MP C90 system features 16 central processing units (CPUs), twice as many as the center's CRAY Y-MP8 system that it replaces, each of which is capable of one gigaflops (one billion floating-point operations per second). The new system has 256 million words of central memory, which is eight times the memory of the center's current CRAY Y-MP system. "We have had a significant and mutually beneficial relationship with Cray Research since our very beginning," said Ralph Roskies, Ph.D., scientific co- director of the center. "In 1988, we signed an important contract with Cray to provide our Center with cutting-edge computing tools to enable us to satisfy our mission as an NSF Center, a role that is critical to continuing U.S. technological strength. We are continuing to rely on this technology-driven company, and look forward to the performance and advanced capabilities of the C90, as well as the company's future MPP systems." Cray Research already has received seven orders and one letter-of-intent for the powerful CRAY Y-MP C90 system, and demand for the new system has filled the production schedule for the next 12 months. The full 16-CPU system has been running at Cray Research since October, and customer shipments are expected to begin in first quarter of 1992. Cray Research, Inc. designs, manufactures, markets, and supports high- performance computer systems for scientific and engineering applications. The company currently has 277 systems installed worldwide, of which 44 are dedicated to academic research. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, was established in 1986 by a grant from the National Science Foundation with support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. ### Editor's Note: The CRAY Y-MP C90 model will be on display in the Cray Research booth at the Supercomputing '91 conference at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque from Nov. 19 - 22.