Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
including integrated Web support, and enhanced support for distributed file system. It
also supported Internet, intranet and extranet platforms, active directory, virtual private
networks, file and directory encryption, and installation of the W2K OS from a server
located on the LAN.
1976, Cray Research developed the Cray-1 (left)
supercomputer with vectorial architecture, which
was installed at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. The $8.8 million machine could
perform 160 FLOPS (world record at the time)
and had an 8-megabyte (1 million words) main
memory. The machines hardware contained no
wires longer than four feet and had a “unique C-
shape”, which allowed integrated circuits to be
very close together. In 1982, Steve Chen’s and
his research group built the Cray X-MP (right) by
making architectural changes to the Cray-1,
which contained two Cray-1 compatible
pipelined processors and a shared memory
(essentially two Cray-1 machines were linked
together in parallel using a shared memory).
This was the first use of shared-memory
multiprocessing in vector supercomputing. The
initial computational speedup of the twoprocessor
X-MP over the Cray-1 was 300%—
three times the computational speed by only
doubling the number of processors. It was
capable of 500 megaflops. This machine
became world’s most commercially successful
parallel vector supercomputers. Chen
commented that the X in X-MP stood for
“extraordinary”. The X-MP ran on UNICOS,
which was Cray’s first UNIX-like operating
system. In 1985, the Cray-2 reached one
billion FLOPS and had the world’s largest
memory at 2048 megabytes. In 1988, Cray
produced the Y-MP, which was first
supercomputer to “sustain” over one billion
FLOPS on many of its applications. It had
multiple 333 million FLOPS processors that
could achieve 2.3 billion FLOPS. liii
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