<P> Cray, meanwhile, had left CDC and formed his own company . Considering the problems with the STAR, he designed an improved version of the same basic concept but replaced the STAR's memory - based vectors with ones that ran in large registers . Combining this with his famous packaging improvements produced the Cray - 1 . This outperformed every computer in the world and would ultimately sell about 80 units, making it one of the most successful supercomputer systems in history . Through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s a series of machines from Cray further improved on these basic concepts . </P> <P> The basic concept of using a pipeline dedicated to processing large data units became known as vector processing, and came to dominate the supercomputer field . A number of Japanese firms also entered the field, producing similar concepts in much smaller machines . Three main lines were produced by these companies, the Fujitsu VP, Hitachi HITAC and NEC SX series, all announced in the early 1980s and updated continually into the 1990s . CDC attempted to re-enter this market with the ETA10 but this was not very successful . Convex Computer took another route, introducing a series of much smaller vector machines aimed at smaller businesses . </P> <P> The only computer to seriously challenge the Cray - 1's performance in the 1970s was the ILLIAC IV . This machine was the first realized example of a true massively parallel computer, in which many processors worked together to solve different parts of a single larger problem . In contrast with the vector systems, which were designed to run a single stream of data as quickly as possible, in this concept, the computer instead feeds separate parts of the data to entirely different processors and then recombines the results . The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray - 1's peak of 250 MFLOPS . However, development problems led to only 64 processors being built, and the system could never operate faster than about 200 MFLOPS while being much larger and more complex than the Cray . Another problem was that writing software for the system was difficult, and getting peak performance from it was a matter of serious effort . </P> <P> But the partial success of the ILLIAC IV was widely seen as pointing the way to the future of supercomputing . Cray argued against this, famously quipping that "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" But by the early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably the Connection Machine (CM) that developed from research at MIT . The CM - 1 used as many as 65,536 simplified custom microprocessors connected together in a network to share data . Several updated versions followed; the CM - 5 supercomputer is a massively parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second . </P>

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