The Cray C90 system, SDSC’s newest Cray Research Inc. supercomputer, officially launched during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The eight-processor Cray C90 system, the latest parallel vector supercomputer from CRI, had roughly twice the speed and memory of the Cray Y-MP, the previous Cray supercomputer at SDSC. Each processor had a peak speed of nearly one billion floating-point operations per second (one gigaflop), giving the system an aggregate peak speed of nearly eight gigaflops. These new capabilities allowed researchers to tackle more complex problems, a critical need.