This Day in History

December 4, 1985

Cray X-MP Supercomputer Begins Operation

The Cray X-MP/48 started operation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The X-MP was popular for generating computer graphics, especially for movies. It nearly doubled the operating speed of competing machines with its parallel processing system, which ran at 420 million floating-point operations per second, or megaflops. An even faster speed could be achieved by arranging two Crays to work together on different parts of the same problem. Other applications included the defense industry and scientific research.