Cray Research Inc yesterday duly launched its Y-MP C90 supercomputer. The general-purpose scientific parallel/vector machine has 16 processors, and operates at four times the speed of Cray’s fastest existing machine, the 2.67 GFLOPS Y-MP 8. Whereas the Y-MP 8 uses Motorola Inc ECL 2,500-gate arrays, the C90 uses Motorola’s ECL 10,000-gate arrays. And on each of the new memory boards, half the space is taken up with memory access logic. The all-new CPU delivers 1 GFLOPS peak; with its 16 processors and 256Gb central memory the system’s theoretical peak performance is 16 GFLOPS, 10 GFLOPS sustained. The new machine uses a balanced parallel, vector-scalar architecture, featuring a dual-vector pipeline which enables each CPU to deliver two vector results per functional unit every clock period; with its 64-way parallelism and multi-processing capabilities, the C90 can deliver a total 64 vector results per clock period. The C90 is available now for customer shipment in January, priced around $30m. Cray claims to have received six orders and one letter of intent for the new machine. * Once more Cray has decided that it will buy Floating Point Systems just days after pulling away and forcing FPS to close most operations and cut 200 jobs – Cray management is reportedly dithering over taking over an incompatible Sparc-based line.
