CDC STAR-100

The CDC STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Control Data Corporation. It was among the first machines built around a vector processor, the first supercomputer to use integrated circuits and the first with one million words of memory. The name blends strings and arrays, and the 100 refers to a nominal peak of 100 million floating-point operations per second. Its 64-bit architecture had 195 instructions including 65 vector instructions strongly influenced by the APL language. The design began as a bid to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid-1960s, and General Motors placed the first commercial order in August 1971. Real performance fell well short of the promise when it entered commercial use in 1974, which helped push CDC from its dominance when the Cray-1 appeared in 1975. Only three systems were delivered, two to Livermore and one to NASA Langley.