The successor to the Cray-1, the Cray X-MP, is a high-performance computer that was developed, built and sold by the company Cray Research in 1982. This Cray X-MP was installed at the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) in January 1987. From 1983 to 1985, the Cray X-MP was the fastest high-performance computer in the world and had a power requirement of 170kW.
The acquisition costs were 7 million US dollars, which at the time was around 12.6 million German marks, but a total of 30 million German marks were spent on installation and operation.
The Cray X-MP was the first parallel vector processor-based computer from Cray Research and could have up to 4 processors at once, each with a theoretical computing power of approximately 210 MegaFLOPS and clocked at 100 Megahertz.
This Cray X-MP/24 has 2 processors and 4 mega-words of main memory, which is where the name comes from. With a word length of 128 bits, this corresponds to 32 megabytes.
The Cray is programmed in FORTRAN and runs on the UNICOS operating system.
At ZIB, the Cray was used 60% for simulations of chemistry, physics and astrophysics, 20% for engineering and 15% for geosciences.
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