Cray X-MP48 is the newly launched SDSC’s hardware centerpiece, with four central processing units (CPUs) and 8 million 64-bit words of memory

Under grey skies atypical of San Diego, a full-size moving van pulled up to SDSC loading dock to deliver the Cray X-MP-48, manufactured by CRAY Research in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. By 10:30 am, every piece of equipment was in place in the machine room. With a CPU cycle time of 9.5 nanoseconds and the parallelism afforded by vectorization, chaining and multitasking, the CRAY X-MP-48 had a peak speed of 840 megaflops (millions of floating point operations per second).

The first calculations were made on December 4, 1985 by Herbert Hamber, UC Irvine.