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Cray 1

CDC followed up with the 7600 four years later in 1968, but Cray left soon after to set up his own supercomputer company, Cray Research. In 1976, the Cray 1 was released. It was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it was primarily tasked with nuclear weapons modeling (hooray for the Cold War!)

Clocked at 80MHz, the Cray 1 used integrated circuits (chips) and increased word size (64-bit) to obtain performance of 136 megaflops — a lot faster than the 3-megaflops CDC 6600. 1,662 printed circuit boards with up to 144 ICs on each were crammed into one of the most distinctive-looking supercomputers ever made. Again, Freon liquid cooling was used.

The shape, incidentally, wasn’t a homage to Star Trek — it actually served a purpose. Speed-dependent modules were placed on the inside edge of the computer, where wire lengths were shorter — without it, the timing would be all wrong and 80MHz wouldn’t have been achievable. The modern day equivalent is the laying out of motherboard traces so that everything works in perfect synchrony at billions of hertz.

The Cray 1 would go on to be one of the most successful supercomputers of all time, with over 80 units sold between 1976 and 1982, for between $5 and $8 million a piece (about $25 million in today’s money — a significant reduction from the $60-million CDC 6600).

Next page: Cray X-MP