Cray Research Inc duly moved its Y-MP product line down-market to position it just above the machines made by minisupercomputer vendors such as Convex Computer Corp with the launch yesterday of the Y-MP2E. The machine comes in one- and two-processor configurations with up to 64M-words of main memory and costs from $2.2m and $5m. It will operate in an air-cooled environment, although water-cooling still appears to be preferred, and Cray claims that it achieves the highest sustained supercomputer performance in its class. It has the same 6nS clock as the bigger Y-MPs, comes in six configurations – uni- and dual-processor models with 16M-words, 32M-words or 64M-words, and runs under th UniCOS implementation of Unix System V. Cray plans first deliveries of the new Y-MPs in April 1991; it also doubled memory on the larger Y-MPs, to 256M-words.
