What are the Cray Research connections with Apple ?
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| Cray Xmp/48 with Apple SE inside (c)1987 John Greenleigh |
Cray Research and Apple, seemly at opposite ends of the computer spectrum, do have some subtle links. It was known that Seymour Cray used an Apple desktop some of the time when designing the Cray-2. It is also known that Apple had a sequence of Cray machines starting in 1986 with an XMP/28 followed by another XMP in Feb 1991. A YMP-2E arrived later in 1991 and finally an EL from Dec 1993 to Jun 98. It is said that Apple's first XMP was bought by Steve Jobs after he just walked into the Cray facility in Mendota Hights.
Mike a more reliable souce relates ....
The first machine installed at Apple was an
X-MP 48 completed in August 1986. It had painted purple metallic columns
and black power supplies. John Scully was the CEO, and he called the
Western Region office in Pleasanton, Ca to get the salesman for his area
of Cupertino, and his call was directed to Mike Wilhelm, the Western
Region Manager, who after a lengthy conversation dispatched the salesman
Bence Gerber, who sold the machine. I was standing at the receptionist
desk who took John Scully's call when it came in, and got excited that
Apple called us, and then went to Mike Wilhelm's secretary to hear what
happened. I was also present for the installation, and spent many days
covering the site.
According to this quote from Macobserver the timeline would indicate that Scully was in charge at that time.
1985: Apple's board of directors authorizes John Sculley to remove Steve Jobs as executive VP and general manager of the faltering Macintosh division. Sculley, who genuinely liked Jobs, didn't act right away, hoping to make a smooth transition. Only after discovering Jobs' plan for a coup the following month did Sculley finally strip the founder of all operational responsibilities.
The machines originally purchased to help out on a computer on a chip project, the machines eventually earned their keep running MOLDFLOW an injection plastic modelling program ( producing some results in the form of Quicktime movies) and later as a file server. Other applications were CFD codes for disk drive design improvement and one source reports ".. they sometimes ran the first XMP as a single user MacOS emulator ... They had a frame buffer and a mouse hooked up to the IOP."
T3d cube of cubes logo animated by changing the size of the surrounding balls.
What is less well known however is that the small active display panel on the T3d was an Apple powerbook. The powerbook ran a Macromedia presentation showing the T3d cube of cubes logo with an orbiting growing/shrinking sphere. The display at one site was changed to alternate with a presentation plaque display. It was rumoured that one site engineer ordered a collection of spare bits that, over time, comprised a complete new powerbook.
According to a CCC inside source Seymour Cray and the Cray Computer Corporation Macintosh computers where the desktop of choice and were used almost exclusivly whilst the company worked on the Cray-3 and Cray-4 projects. Much of such work was moving text and graphic files arround a shared network.
The Sept 1999 launch on the www.Apple.com web site of the G4 Macintosh computers displayed a YMP-8D computer on the processor page. Whilst there was no direct reference to that particular machine there was a requote of the Seymour quote about "using an Apple to simulate the Cray-3" in a sidebar. ( prob this should be Cray-2 ED). The G4 is being touted as a "Supercomputer for the desktop" and with the performance figures of a Gigaflop/s (1 CPU) it is certainly up to at least 1992 supercomputer cpu speed. The YMP pictured on the site would have had 0.333 Gflop/s per cpu but was sold as sustaining 1 Gflop/s, for the whole machine, on real life applications. It remains to be seen if the G4 can match the memory size, memory bandwidth and IO capacity of this 8 year old Cray. Supercomputers these days do a Teraflop/s. There is however no doubt that it will be cheaper to buy.
The popular Macintosh telnet program developed by NCSA has an icon which is an XMP surrounded by a network with Macs. NCSA had a Cray accessed by Macs and thus needed to develop such a program. NCSA = National Centre for Supercomputer Applications.
Another one of those strange coincidences was problems using perspex as a chassis material. Apple had problems with the Cube, the corners were subject to cracking in some instances. At Cray the original Cray 2 had the cylindrical coolant reservoirs and cascades. They found for some reason the perspex that they were made of after a while started to "craze" and appeared like there were many fine cracks in it. In the end they designed a new rectangular cascade that had a smaller footprint and was made of glass ( I think!!) and that solved the problem. More details related here.
Further details in this article from Cray Channels 1987 (c)Cray Research Written by Kent Koeninger at or about the time of the Cray purchase.
