Supercomputers/Systems/Cray-1
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Cray-1
Operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- -
- Rpeak
- 160.0 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 1
- Power
- 115 kW
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Cray Research, Inc. | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Verified | lanl.govebsco.com |
| CPU | Cray-1 CPU CPUs Cray-1 (custom) · 1C · 0.08 GHz Single Cray-1 vector/scalar processor | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 1 verified | Verified | lanl.goven.wikipedia.org |
The read
The machine that opened this dataset's pioneering era: Cray Research shipped serial number 1 to Los Alamos National Laboratory on 4 March 1976 for a free six-month trial, and the two national laboratories' rivalry over who would get it first actually slowed the sale down, per LANL's own history page. Los Alamos initially returned the trial unit because it lacked error-correcting memory; five modified Cray-1 units were purchased once ECC was added. Peak throughput is reported inconsistently across sources (commonly 80 MFLOPS scalar, up to 160-240 MFLOPS peak with three-way vector chaining); this row records the widely cited 160 MFLOPS vendor figure. Sold for as much as $10 million and drew 115 kW, and every Cray-1 was individually hand-wired, taking close to a year to assemble.
Site & facility
Los Alamos Strategic Computing Complex
- Location
- Los Alamos, NM, USA
- Cooling
- Chilled water
- Commissioned
- 1993
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Cray-1 added
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| ebsco.com | names system, part and count | Cray-1 CPU · counts: 1 |
| lanl.gov | names system, part and count | Cray-1 CPU · counts: 1 |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.