Not too wrapped up in its massively parallel supercomputer development programme to neglect its power-hungry customer base, Cray Research Inc has confirmed that it will be launching its 16 GFLOPS Y-MP 16E supercomputer early next year: its first customer shipment is scheduled for January – four systems have been ordered by this undisclosed but valued customer and these will be linked by fibre optic cable so that one very intensive numerical application can be run across four of the 16 processor machines for a total of 64 processors; Cray claims the new system, internally coded the C-90, is ahead of its competitors’ products by factors of four and five; also scheduled for release around the same time as the Y-MP 16E, is the $300,000 Y-MP EL entry-level machine, somewhat cheaper than Cray’s $30m high-end machines; future releases include the 64 GFLOPS Triton, due 1995, the 200 GLOPS-plus Triton-X, due out 1997.
