And Cray Research Inc has been psyching itself up to compete in the growing commercial market for supercomputing: the company is currently involved in a research programme towards the development of a multiple instruction multiple data design massively parallel supercomputer; as part of this programme, the Eden Prairie, Minnesota company is working on a special processor which will replace the existing functional unit in a Y-MP system with an application-specific functional unit basically enabling the recycling of existing systems to provide much more speed, for dedicated commercial applications such as image processing; Cray’s future massively parallel machines are to yield the TeraFLOPS performance necessary for car and aeroplane manufacturers simultaneously to process data from crash simulation and aerodynamics calculations.
