Digital Equipment Corp formally announced yesterday that it now has an exclusive worldwide arrangement to distribute Eagan, Minnesota-based Cray Research Inc’s entry-level Y-MP EL for the next three years (CI No 1,804). For the first six months, both Cray and DEC will distribute the $300,000 machine, which features one to four CPUs, each with a peak performance of 133 MFLOPS; then, from July 1, the responsibility is all DEC’s. DEC, which will keep the Cray name, says it will sell the Cray baby alongside the DEC VAX 9000 vector machine, rating 125 to 500 MFLOPS, and the DECmpp line of DEC-badged MasPar Computer Corp massively parallel supercomputers. Being Unix-based, the Cray Y-MP EL system is seen by DEC as the open equivalent of DEC’s high-end VMS-based VAX 9000 vector machine, and it is not anticipated that the Cray machine will impede on DEC’s own product sales – where there’s a Cray, says supercomputer marketing manager Simon Cole, somewhere there’s a VAX. DEC has agreed to sell at least half of the 100 Cray Y-MP EL systems planned for sale in 1992 – Cray claims to have received 50 orders to date for three-month-old system. A separate Cray-DEC pact, on service for the Y-MP EL, is expected to be signed in the near future. DEC, which now uses the same public relations company as Cray, wouldn’t say whether it will take other Cray machines for distribution in the future.
