Cydra-5

The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first minisupercomputer designed by Cydrome. It was completed in 1987. At that time Cydra-5 cost from $0.5 million to $1 million, but achieved one-third to one-Half performance of supercomputers which cost around $10 million to $20 million.

The Cydra-5 is a heterogeneous processor system. There are two types of processors functionally specialized for different components of workload. The numerical processor just work on numerical computations while the general purpose processor worked on non-numerical instructions to keep the numerical processor free from that work.

Design philosophy

The host processor/attached processor approach was rejected because of its performance limitations.

References

• The Cydra 5 Departmental Supercomputer: design philosophies, decisions and trade-offs