Supercomputers/Systems/NCAR Cray-1A S/N 14
USA · decommissioned · hpc
NCAR Cray-1A S/N 14
Also known as Cray-1A serial 14; CA
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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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
- 0.2 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-1A serial number 14, previously owned | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
| CPU | Cray-1 CPU CPUs Cray-1 (custom) · 1C · 0.08 GHz Cray-1A single vector processor, 12.5 ns clock | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 1 reported | Reported | cisl.ucar.edu |
The read
NCAR's second Cray-1A, a low-cost previously owned unit bought with US Department of Energy funding and put into service in May 1983 to replace the aging CDC 7600. NCAR says it was configured like the first, with a 12.5 ns clock, eight 64-element vector registers, 1 million 64-bit words of memory and 16 DD-19 disks, for a 160 MFLOPS peak. The 115 kW power figure is from NCAR's supercomputing-history table. It was decommissioned in October 1986 to make way for NCAR's first multiprocessor, the Cray X-MP. NCAR is the only source fetched, so the tier is reported.
Site & facility
NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder)
- Location
- Boulder, CO, USA
- Commissioned
- 1986
Change history
- 2026-10-09 Added NCAR Cray-1A S/N 14
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-1 CPU · counts: 1 |
Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.