Supercomputers/Systems/Cray Y-MP
USA · decommissioned · hpc
Cray Y-MP
Also known as Y-MP8/864 "Shavano"
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
- 2.7 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 8
- 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 Y-MP CPU CPUs Cray Y-MP (custom) · 1C · 0.1667 GHz Cray Y-MP8/864 eight-processor system | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 8 verified | Verified | cisl.ucar.eduosc.edu |
The read
The Cray Y-MP line's first installation was at NASA Ames in fall 1988; the unit recorded here is NCAR's own Y-MP8/864, nicknamed 'Shavano' after a Colorado fourteener, installed 21 May 1990 in the Mesa Laboratory computer room and decommissioned 30 June 1997 (dismantled the following April). Peak performance of 2.667 GFLOPS across 8 processors is the commonly cited Y-MP8 figure (confirmed independently by Wikipedia and Ohio Supercomputer Center, which both give essentially the same 2.7 billion FLOPS figure) rather than a number NCAR's own page states directly; NCAR's own page does state the machine sustained over 1 GFLOPS on an NCAR ocean model, an industry record at the time, and that it marked the Scientific Computing Division's move from Cray's COS to UNIX-based UNICOS. Replaced NCAR's Cray X-MP (cray-xmp in this dataset) and was NCAR's most heavily used supercomputer to that point.
Site & facility
NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder)
- Location
- Boulder, CO, USA
- Commissioned
- 1986
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Cray Y-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 |
|---|---|---|
| cisl.ucar.edu | names system, part and count | Cray Y-MP CPU · counts: 8 |
| osc.edu | names system, part and count | Cray Y-MP CPU · counts: 8 |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.