All posts tagged "supercomputer"

The first commercially successful supercomputer, the Cray-1, stars as the featured subject on a new one-dollar coin released by the United State Mint earlier today. While many of today’s younger technology workers might not be familiar with the Cray-1, the Cray-1’s release 50 years ago marked a watershed moment in establishing the United States as a leader in the realm of high-performance computing. At the time of its release, the Cray-1 was 10 times faster than competing machines, a difference so significant that the Cray-1 dominated as the world's fastest computer for over half a decade. Designed for rapidly performing heavy-duty calculations, the Cray-1 was shaped like a circular "C" (with a human-usable bench around it) – a signature look that reduced internal latency by allowing the use of shorter wire lengths than would otherwise be necessary. The Cray-1 was also the first commercially-successful computer to offer vector processing – that is, the ability to simultaneously run operations on multiple data points; the Cray-1’s success in this regard helped bring about the era of parallel processing from which we all benefit today. The Cray-1 was not cheap – in today’s dollars it cost somewhere around $50 million to purchase, and it used about $200,000 worth of electricity per month. But, for entities like Los Alamos National Laboratory, which utilized the first Cray-1 ever produced in order to run simulations of complex nuclear reactions (and, as a result, was able to perform various measurements without having to produce actual nuclear detonations that would otherwise have been required in order to yield the same scientific knowledge) the Cray-1 supercomputer was invaluable. Of course, a half century of rapid technological innovation might make the Cray-1’s specifications seem weak – especially to those unfamiliar with earlier eras of computing. The Z Fold 7 smartphone released by Samsung last year, for example, sports a processor than can perform some calculations at a rate of more than 20,000 times as fast as the Cray-1’s 160 MFLOPS (Million Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS). That said, in its time, the Cray-1’s performance seemed to many people to almost be the stuff of science fiction. The US Mint honors the Cray-1 as part of its American Innovation Dollar Series, on the coin minted to honor achievements made in Wisconsin, where the Cray-1’s primary inventor, the late Seymour Cray, lived and built his research and development company. The coin can be obtained from the US Mint website.

All posts tagged "supercomputer"

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First Commercially Successful Supercomputer, Cray-1, Featured On New US Dollar Coin

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