Editing Cray-1 (section)

==History==
From 1968 to 1972, Seymour Cray of [[Control Data Corporation]] (CDC) worked on the [[CDC 8600]], the successor to his earlier [[CDC 6600]] and [[CDC 7600]] designs. The 8600 was essentially made up of four 7600s in a box with an additional special mode that allowed them to operate [[lockstep (computing)|lock-step]] in a [[SIMD]] fashion.

Jim Thornton, formerly Cray's engineering partner on earlier designs, had started a more radical project known as the [[CDC STAR-100]]. Unlike the 8600's brute-force approach to performance, the STAR took an entirely different route. The main processor of the STAR had lower performance than the 7600, but added hardware and instructions to speed up particularly common supercomputer tasks.

By 1972, the 8600 had reached a dead end; the machine was so incredibly complex that it was impossible to get one working properly. Even a single faulty component would render the machine non-operational. Cray went to [[William Norris (CEO)|William Norris]], Control Data's CEO, saying that a redesign from scratch was needed. At the time, the company was in serious financial trouble, and with the STAR in the pipeline as well, Norris could not invest the money.

As a result, Cray left CDC and started [[Cray Research]] very close to the CDC lab. In the back yard of the land he purchased in [[Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin|Chippewa Falls]], Cray and a group of former CDC employees started looking for ideas. At first, the concept of building another supercomputer seemed impossible, but after Cray Research's [[Chief technology officer|Chief Technology Officer]] travelled to [[Wall Street]] and found a lineup of investors willing to back Cray, all that was needed was a design.

For four years Cray Research designed its first computer.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JT0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=RA1-PA45 |title=Tom Swift Meets the Big Boys: Small Firms Beware |work=InfoWorld |date=October 5, 1981 |access-date=2015-01-01 |author=Swaine, Michael |pages=45}}</ref> In 1975 the 80&nbsp;MHz Cray-1 was announced. The excitement was so high that a bidding war for the first machine broke out between [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]] and [[Los Alamos National Laboratory]], the latter eventually winning and receiving serial number 001 in 1976 for a six-month trial. The [[National Center for Atmospheric Research]] (NCAR) was the first official customer of Cray Research in 1977, paying US$8.86 million ($7.9 million plus $1 million for the disks) for serial number 3. The NCAR machine was decommissioned in 1989.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp |title=SCD Supercomputer Gallery |publisher=NCAR |access-date=2010-06-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150607021044/http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/cray/cray1.jsp |archive-date=June 7, 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref> The company expected to sell perhaps a dozen of the machines, and set the selling price accordingly, but ultimately over 80 Cray-1s of all types were sold, priced from $5M to $8M. The machine made Seymour Cray a celebrity and his company a success, lasting until the supercomputer crash in the early 1990s.

Based on a recommendation by [[William J. Perry|William Perry]]'s study, the [[National Security Agency|NSA]] purchased a Cray-1 for theoretical research in [[cryptanalysis]]. According to Budiansky, "Though standard histories of Cray Research would persist for decades in stating that the company's first customer was Los Alamos National Laboratory, in fact it was NSA..."<ref name=Stephen>{{cite book|last1=Budiansky|first1=Stephen|title=Code Warriors|date=2016|publisher=Alfred A. Knopf|location=New York|isbn=9780385352666|pages=298–300}}</ref>

The 160&nbsp;[[FLOPS|MFLOPS]] Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800&nbsp;MFLOPS [[Cray X-MP]], the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced [[Cray-2]], capable of 1.9&nbsp;GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the first two models but met a somewhat limited commercial success because of certain problems at producing sustained performance in real-world applications. A more conservatively designed evolutionary successor of the Cray-1 and X-MP models was therefore made by the name [[Cray Y-MP]] and launched in 1988.

By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a [[Google]] [[Nexus 10]] or [[HTC One (M7)|HTC One]], performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.anandtech.com/show/6971/exploring-the-floating-point-performance-of-modern-arm-processors |title=Exploring the Floating Point Performance of Modern ARM Processors |author=Rahul Garg |date=June 2, 2013 |work=Anandtech}}</ref> while the [[Apple A13|A13 processor]] in a 2019 [[iPhone 11]] performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a13-bionic-specs/|title=Apple A13 Bionic Specs}}</ref> a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach [[History of supercomputing|until 1994]].