Cray-1

Cray-1
A Cray-1 on display at the Science Museum in London
Design
Manufacturer	Cray Research
Designer	Seymour Cray
Release date	1975
Units sold	Over 100
Price	US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $39.7 million in 2023)
Casing
Dimensions	Height: 196 cm (77 in)[1] Dia. (base): 263 cm (104 in)[1] Dia. (columns): 145 cm (57 in)[1]
Weight	5.5 tons (Cray-1A)
Power	115 kW @ 208 V 400 Hz[1]
System
Front-end	Data General Eclipse
Operating system	COS & UNICOS
CPU	64-bit processor @ 80 MHz[1]
Memory	8.39 Megabytes (up to 1 048 576 words)[1]
Storage	303 Megabytes (DD19 Unit)[1]
FLOPS	160 MFLOPS
Successor	Cray X-MP
v t e

The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system.

The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. Previous systems like the CDC STAR-100 and ASC had implemented these concepts but did so in a way that seriously limited their performance. The Cray-1 addressed these problems and produced a machine that ran several times faster than any similar design.

The Cray-1's architect was Seymour Cray; the chief engineer was Cray Research co-founder Lester Davis.^[2] They would go on to design several new machines using the same basic concepts, and retained the performance crown into the 1990s.