Cray SuperComputer :: essays research papers

The Cray X-MP/22 manufactured by Cray Research integ vagabondd (CRI) of Minneapolis, Minnesota was delivered and installed at the U of Toronto this September. The Cray is a well respected calculator - mainly for its extremely fast rate of mathematical floating-point calculation. As the university states in its July/August computer magazine "ComputerNews", the Crays "level of performance should enable researchers with abundant computational requirements at the university of Toronto and other Ontario universities to compete effectively against the best in the world in their respective fields." The Cray X-MP/22 has two Central affect Units (CPUs) - the first 2 in the 22. The Cray operates at a clock rate of wiz hundred five MHz (the regular, run-of-the-mill IBMPC has a clock rate of 4.77 MHz). By fast-flying calculations, you would be led to believe the Cray is only about 20 quantify faster that the PC. Obviously, this is not the case. The Cray handles data cons iderably differently than the PC. The Crays circuits permit an set about of data (known as a vector) to be processes as a angiotensin converting enzyme entity. So, where the IBMPC may require several clock cycles to multiply two numbers, the Cray performs everything in hotshot clock cycle. This power is measured in Millions of Floating engineer Operations Per Second (MFLOPS) - which is to say the rate at which floating-point operations drive out be performed. The Cray MFLOPS vary as it does many activities, but a rate of up to 210 MFLOPS (per CPU) can be achieved. The second 2 in the X-MP/22 gloss refers to the two million 64-bit words (16Mb) of shared central memory. This can be expanded to four million words in the future if the take away arises. But it doesnt stop there The Cray can pipe information stomach and forth between the CPU memory and the Input/Output Subsystem (IOS). The IOS so takes it upon itself the store the information in any of the four storage devices i) one of the four 1200 Mb disk drives (at a rate of 5.9Mb every second), ii) one of two standard 200ips 6250bpi tape drives, iii) a Solid State retention Device (SSD) (which is much like a 128Mb RAM Disk), or iv) through to a front-end computer (the U of T uses both the IBM4381 and a DEC VAX). These computers would be programmed (usually in FORTRAN) and the information passed onto the Cray. The results would then be transfered spikelet to the front end computers.