Cray X-MP

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Harry Nelson in front of a Cray X-MP

Cray X-MP,
a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research Inc., announced in 1982 as successor of the Cray-1. It was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 . Its principal designer was Steve Chen. The X-MP's main improvement over the Cray-1 was a shared-memory, parallel vector processor, housing two CPUs in a mainframe that was nearly identical in outside appearance to the Cray-1. The X-MP CPU had a faster 9.5 nanosecond clock cycle (105 MHz), compared to 12.5 ns for the Cray-1. It was built from bipolar gate array integrated circuits containing 16 emitter-coupled logic gates each, and was very similar to the Cray-1 CPU in architecture, and object-code compatible . In 1984, improved models of the X-MP were announced, consisting of up to four-processor systems.

Cray-2

The Cray-2 was a supercomputer with four vector processors built with emitter-coupled logic starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot .

Cray Y-MP

X-MP successor Cray Y-MP was sold by Cray Research from 1988, retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. The Y-MP could be equipped with two, four or eight vector processors .

Cray C90

The Cray C90 series (Y-MP C90) was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The series included the C94, C98 and C916 models with a maximum of four, eight, and 16 processors respectively .

Chess Programs

• Cray Blitz
• Lachex

See also

• Cray-1
• Cray T3D
• Cray T3E
• Dynamic Tree Splitting

Manuals

• The Cray X-MP Series of Computer Systems (pdf)
• CAL Assembly Reference Manual (pdf)

Publications

• Steve S. Chen, Jack Dongarra, Christopher C. Hsiung (1984). Multiprocessing linear algebra algorithms on the CRAY X-MP-2: Experiences with small granularity. Journal of Parallel Distributed Computing, Vol. 1, No. 2, pdf
• Harry Nelson (1984). How We Won The Computer Chess World's Championship. Excerpt from a talk given at he DAS Computer Science Colloquium, pdf from The Computer History Museum » WCCC 1983
• Robert Hyatt (1985). Parallel Chess on the Cray X-MP/48. ICCA Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2
• Robert Hyatt (1988). A High-Performance Parallel Algorithm to Search Depth-First Game Trees. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham
• Melvin C. August, Gerald M. Brost, Christopher C. Hsiung, Alan J. Schiffleger (1989). Cray X-MP: The Birth of a Supercomputer. IEEE Computer, Vol. 22, No. 1
• Robert Hyatt, Bruce W. Suter, Harry Nelson (1989). A Parallel Alpha-Beta Tree Searching Algorithm. Parallel Computing, Vol. 10, No. 3.
• Robert Hyatt, Harry Nelson (1990). Chess and supercomputers: details about optimizing Cray Blitz. Supercomputing '90, pdf
• Robert Hyatt (1994). The DTS high-performance parallel tree search algorithm.» Dynamic Tree Splitting
• Robert Hyatt (1997). The Dynamic Tree-Splitting Parallel Search Algorithm. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1

Forum Posts

• hardware of Cray Blitz by Leonid, CCC, June 13, 1999 » WCCC 1983
• Cray and supercomputers (kinda long) by Joshua Shriver, CCC, September 16, 2005
• Cray Blitz source (Carey) by Robert Hyatt, CCC, September 10, 2008

External Links

• Cray X-MP from Wikipedia
• Category: Cray X-MP - Wikimedia Commons
• Cray (brand) from Wikipedia
• Cray, the Supercomputer Company | Cray"

Company History | Cray

• Cray Super Computers - Cray XMP
• CRAY X-MP/48 from SCD Supercomputer Gallery
• High Performance Computer Architectures: A Historical Perspective - The CRAY X-MP
• Cray-2 from Wikipedia
• Cray Y-MP from Wikipedia
• Cray C90 from Wikipedia

References

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