Cray Research Inc has decided that although it will have to play catch-up, massively parallel supercomputing is too important to its future for it to rely on any partner to give it a leg up into the business. There had been informed speculation that it might do some kind of strategic deal with Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc on the Cambridge company’s massively parallel Motorola Inc 88000 machines. Cray now says that although it may buy software, or one or more machines from Bolt, Beranek, its machines will essentially be all its own work. It plans to have a first generation development system ready in 1993: it will use microprocessors – presumably off the shelf – and will be designed to work closely with the Y-MP family. It is being designed to deliver 100 GFLOPS, and Cray is targeting successive models in 1995 and 1997 that will take the line into the TeraFLOPS performance range.
