The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. The company's first shared-memory, parallel vector processor (PVP) machine. It was the 1982 "cleaned up" successor to the 1976 Cray-1, and the world's fastest computer 1983–1985. The principal designer was Steve Chen.
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Description
The X-MP shared the "horseshoe" design of the earlier machine and looked almost identical on the outside. The processors initially ran on a 9.5 nanosecond (105 MHz) clock (compared to 12.5 ns for the Cray-1A), delivering a theoretical peak speed of 200 megaflops per processor and 400 megaflops for the original two processor 1982 machine[1]. Other improvements over the Cray-1 included: better chaining support and shared memory access with multiple memory ports per processor.
Cray Research continually enhanced the X-MP over the years. The X-MP/48 (1984) contained 4 CPUs with theoretical system peak speed of over 800 megaflops[1]. The X-MP/48 also introduced vector gather/scatter memory reference instructions to the product line. Clock speeds were improved to 8.5 ns (117 MHz), giving a per-cpu peak speed of over 230 MFlops[citation needed]. Memory sizes were also increased over time, culminating in the X-MP/EA series machines (1986) which offered the newer Cray Y-MP 32-bit memory addressing, in addition to the older Cray-1 compatible 24-bit addressing.
The system initially ran the proprietary Cray Operating System (COS) and was object-code compatible with the Cray-1. UniCOS (a UNIX System V derivative) ran through a guest operating system facility. UniCOS became the main OS from 1986 onwards. The DOE ran the Cray Time Sharing System OS instead. The Cray X-MP was used for rendering "The Adventures of André and Wally B.," a short film by the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, which evolved into Pixar Animation Studios. The Cray X-MP was also used for rendering graphics in The Last Starfighter.
Configurations
The X-MP was sold with one, two, or four processors and from two to sixteen megawords (16–128 MB) of word-addressable RAM main memory[1] (while initial memory capacity was limited to 16 megawords with a 24-bit address register, the later extended memory architecture XMP/EA raised addressable memory to a theoretical 2 gigawords, in practice the largest memory produced was 64 megawords). The XMP/EA had an 8.5 nanosecond clock, delivering a theoretical peak speed of 942 megaflops. In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (12.53 gigaflops)[citation needed].
The I/O subsystem could have two to four I/O processors with a total of two to 32 disk storage units. The DD-39 and DD-49 hard drives each stored 1.2 GiB with 5.9 MiB/s and 9.8 MiB/s transfer rates, respectively. Optional solid state drives were available with 256, 512 or 1024 MiB with transfer rates of 100 to 1000 MB/s per channel[1].
A 1984 X-MP/48 was about US$15 million plus the cost of disks, and in 1985 Bell Labs purchased a Cray X-MP/24 for $10.5 million along with eight DD-49 1.2 GB drives for an additional $1 million, They also received $1.5 million in trade-in credit for their Cray 1.[2]
Image gallery
 Control panel of the CRAY-XMP48 |
 Logic boards of the CRAY-XMP48 |
 Cooling system of the CRAY-XMP48 |
Successors
The Cray-2, a completely new design, was introduced 1985. A very different compact four-processor design with from 64 MW to 512 MW (512 MB to 4 GB) of main memory, it was specified to 500 megaflops but was slower than the X-MP on certain calculations due to its high memory latency. (In 1986 an X-MP/48 achieved a speed of 713 megaflops on the standardized LINPACK tests.)
The X-MP-succeeding Cray Y-MP series was sold from 1988; it also had a new design, replacing the 16 Gate Array design with a more compact VLSI chip design with larger circuit boards. It was a major improvement of the X-MP with up to eight processors.
Trivia
- A horseshoe-shaped X-MP-like computer acts as a furniture-prop for Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley in the hacker-thriller Sneakers.
- In Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, three Cray X-MPs provide the park's computing power - but in the movie they are replaced by a Thinking Machines system. Also, in Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a Cray X-MP is featured, as the supercomputer supporting Site B.
References
- ^ a b c d Cray (1985) (PDF). The Cray X-MP Series of Computer Systems. Press release. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Cray/Cray.X-MP.1985.102646183.pdf.
- ^ Dennis Ritchie (2000-09). "Two Cray X/MP papers". http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cray.html. Retrieved on 2009-04-02.
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