Cray Research EL-98

Cray Research EL-98

During the middle years of the Cray YMP family, the low end of the Cray customer base was being eroded by smaller air-cooled machines like the Convex c220. Around this time a small start-up company called SuperTek introduced the SuperTek S-1, an air-cooled CMOS implementation of the XMP CPU architecture linked to a proprietary VME I/O subsystem. SuperTek solicited the Cray customer base but failed to gain many customers. Eventually the company went bankrupt and was bought by Cray. The SuperTek S-1 was then sold and supported by Cray as the Cray XMS. The SuperTek S-2 was developed and became the Y-MP/EL, a CMOS implementation of the YMP architecture. The YMP-EL initially available in 1..4 CPUs used a very similar VME based IO sub-system to the XMS system. The YMP-EL was received with reasonable enthusiasm by the XMS customer base, which had been struggling with the difficult XMS product, and the baby Cray started to sell in reasonable numbers, for a Cray product anyway.

This 1995 Cray Research model EL-98 came to us through the generosity of Aerosoft, Inc. of Blacksburg, Va. The EL-98 (Entry Level) was a smaller version of the Y-MP introduced in 1988 and utilised more compact technology, materially reducing its size. It runs version 8.0.1 of Cray's UNICOS operating system.The system contains the following boards:

Processor Subrack: