Cray-1

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The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system. The Cray-1 was the first supercomputer to successfully implement the vector processor design. These systems improve the performance of math operations by arranging memory and registers to quickly perform a single operation on a large set of data. Previous systems like the CDC STAR-100 and ASC had implemented these concepts but did so in a way that seriously limited their performance. The Cray-1 addressed these problems and produced a machine that ran several times faster than any similar design. The Cray-1's architect was Seymour Cray; the chief engineer was Cray Research co-founder Lester Davis. They would go on to design several new machines using the same basic concepts, and retained the performance crown into the 1990s.