The Cray Superserver 6400, or CS6400, is a discontinued

multiprocessor Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

server computer system produced by Cray Research Superservers, Inc., a subsidiary of

Cray Research Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

, and launched in 1993. The CS6400 was also sold as the

Amdahl Amdahl may refer to: People * Einar Amdahl (1888-1974), Norwegian theologist * Bjarne Amdahl (1903-1968), Norwegian pianist and composer * Douglas K. Amdahl Douglas K. Amdahl (January 23, 1919 – August 24, 2010) was an American lawyer and j ...

SPARCsummit 6400E. The CS6400 (codenamed ''SuperDragon'' during development) superseded the earlier

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

-based Cray S-MP system, which was designed by Floating Point Systems. However, the CS6400 adopted the XDBus packet-switched inter-processor bus also used in

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

' SPARCcenter 2000 (''Dragon'') and SPARCserver 1000 (''Baby Dragon'' or ''Scorpion'')

Sun4d Sun4d is a computer architecture introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1992. It is a development of the earlier Sun-4 architecture, using the XDBus system bus, SuperSPARC processors, and SBus I/O cards. The XDBus was the result of a collaboration be ...

systems. This bus originated in the

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...

Dragon multiprocessor workstation designed at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xer ...

. The CS6400 was available with either 60

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one h ...

SuperSPARC-I or 85 MHz SuperSPARC-II processors, maximum RAM capacity was 16 GB. Other features shared with the Sun servers included use of the same

SuperSPARC The SuperSPARC is a microprocessor that implements the SPARC V8 instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Sun Microsystems. 33 and 40 MHz versions were introduced in 1992. The SuperSPARC contains 3.1 million transistors. It was fabrica ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

and Solaris

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

. However, the CS6400 could be configured with four to 64 processors on quad XDBusses at 55 MHz, compared with the SPARCcenter 2000's maximum of 20 on dual XDBusses at 40 or 50 MHz and the SPARCserver 1000's maximum of 8 on a single XDBus. Unlike the Sun SPARCcenter 2000 and SPARCserver 1000, each CS6400 is equipped with an external System Service Processor (SSP), a

SPARCstation The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines are a series of SPARC-based computer workstations and servers in desktop, desk side (pedestal) and rack-based form factor configurations, that were developed and sold by Sun Microsystem ...

fitted with a

JTAG JTAG (named after the Joint Test Action Group which codified it) is an industry standard for verifying designs and testing printed circuit boards after manufacture. JTAG implements standards for on-chip instrumentation in electronic design autom ...

interface to communicate with the CS6400 to configure its internal bus control card. The other systems have a JTAG interface, but it is not used for this purpose. While the CS6400 only requires the SSP to be used for configuration changes (e.g. a CPU card is pulled for maintenance), some derivative designs, in particular the Sun Enterprise 10000, are useless without their SSP. Upon

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

' acquisition of Cray Research in 1996, the Superserver business (by now the

Cray Business Systems Division Floating Point Systems, Inc. (FPS), was a Beaverton, Oregon vendor of attached array processors and minisupercomputers. The company was founded in 1970 by former Tektronix engineer Norm Winningstad, with partners Tom Prince, Frank Bouton and Rob ...

) was sold to Sun. This included ''Starfire'', the CS6400's successor then under development, which became the Sun Enterprise 10000.

References

External links

"Cray: Faster Than A Bottleneck Bullet", ''Byte'', January 1996

Enthusiast photographs

Running system (circa 2004)

{{Cray computers

Cs6400 The Cray Superserver 6400, or CS6400, is a discontinued multiprocessor server computer system produced by Cray Research Superservers, Inc., a subsidiary of Cray Research, and launched in 1993. The CS6400 was also sold as the Amdahl SPARCsummit 6400 ...

Sun servers Supercomputers