Cray Research Inc is to come out with an air-cooled uniprocessor based on the top-end Y-MP supercomputer within the next three months, the company’s chairman John Rollwagen announced in Tokyo yesterday. The company also revealed plans for a massively parallel supercomputer delivering 1 TFLOPS. The new low-end machine, pitched to compete with the likes of Convex Computer Corp and Alliant Computer Systems Corp in the scientific server market, will be cheaper to install and to run by virtue of being air cooled, but there will be a performance penalty, although Rollwagen says that the Y-MP-compatible machine will deliver more than the 500 MFLOPS of the current single processor liquid-cooled Y-MP, which costs $2m to $3m, Reuters reports. In its maximum eight processor configuration, the Y-MP has been benchmarked as the fastest supercomputer available, outperforming the top-of-the-line models from Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd and NEC Corp. Running the Perfect Benchmark suite of 13 programs, the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Y-MP was found to deliver 3,500 times the performance of the DEC VAX-11/780; on the same benchmark, the Stardent Computer Inc machines, doing 53 times better than the VAX-11/780 and costing $123,400 was found to offer the best price-performance. On the TeraFLOPS machine, Rollwagen said that where today’s supercomputers can model airflows over an aircraft wing, the planned parallel box would be able to simulate an entire aircraft in flight in real time. Cray planned to marshall industry consortia to develop components, systems and software for the planned machine, with the target for launch in the middle of the decade. Rollwagen believes that the agreement between the US and Japan that tenders for government and university supercomputer contracts will be open to US as well as Japanese machines will bring Cray an additional $100m sales a year.
