Acquisition of Cray Y-MP is part of the broad effort to upgrade the capabilities of all NSF-sponsored supercomputer centers.

With two times the number of processors as the Cray X-MP and a faster cycle time (6.0 nanoseconds vs. 9.5 nanoseconds on the X-MP), the Cray Y-MP substantially expanded SDSC’s capabilities and capacity, allowing researchers to study computational problems of greater complexity and size. To provide a common environment across all NSF centers with Cray supercomputers, the Y-MP was set up to run the UNICOS operating system.