Cray Y-MP EL

The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X_MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ELC technology was used and a new liquid cooling system was devised. The Y-MP ran the Cray UNICOS operating system

The Y-MP could be equipped with two, four or eight vector processes with two functional units each and a clock cycle time of 6 ns (167 MHz). Peak performance was thus 333 megaflops per processor. Main memory comprised 128, 256 or 512 MB of SRAM.

 

In 1992, Cray launched the cheaper Y-MP-EL  (Entry Level) model. This was a reimplementation of the Y-MP architecture in CMOS technology, based on the S-2 design acquired by Cray from Supertek Computers in 1990. The EL was an air-cooled system with a completely different VME-bus based IOS. EL configurations with up to four processors (each with a peak performance of 133 megaflops) and 32 MB to 1 GB of DRAM were available. The Y-MP EL was later developed into the Cray EL90 series.

The Y-MP EL came in a cabinet much smaller than the traditional room-filling Cray 2010×1270×810 mm (height × width × depth) and 635 kg in weight—and could be powered from regular mains power.