Supercomputers/Systems/Cray X-MP
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Cray X-MP
Operated by NCAR at NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder) .
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
- 0.9 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 4
- Power
- -
- 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 | - | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
| CPU | Cray X-MP CPU CPUs Cray X-MP (custom) · 1C · 0.105 GHz Cray X-MP four-processor system | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 4 reported | Reported | cisl.ucar.eduen.wikipedia.org |
The read
The X-MP line was announced in 1982 as Cray Research's first shared-memory multiprocessor and the successor to the Cray-1; the specific unit recorded here is NCAR's own four-processor X-MP, installed 1 October 1986 and NCAR's first multiprocessor supercomputer, four years after the product line's debut at earlier customers. NCAR's own supercomputing-history page gives 941 MFLOPS peak and a sustained average of about 225 MFLOPS (roughly a quarter of peak) across real workloads, including a parallel version of the Community Climate Model that ran 3.7x faster on the full machine than on one processor. Decommissioned 30 September 1990 after four years of service, once NCAR's Cray Y-MP8 ('Shavano', also in this dataset as cray-ymp) came online.
Site & facility
NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder)
- Location
- Boulder, CO, USA
- Commissioned
- 1986
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Cray X-MP 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 |
|---|---|---|
| en.wikipedia.org | names system, part and count | Cray X-MP CPU · counts: 4 |
| cisl.ucar.edu | names system, part and count | Cray X-MP CPU · counts: 4 |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.