After seven years of faithful service, the CRAY Y-MP8/864 known as "shavano" was switched off on 30 June 1997.
Shavano was
delivered on 21 May 1990 via a crane that lowered the supercomputer down the access shaft next to the NCAR machine room. Shavano was named after a
14,000-foot peak in the Colorado Rockies, which in turn had been named for Chief Che-Wa-No, chief of the Tabeguache branch of the Ute Indians.
The Y-MP had eight processors that could run independently or in parallel, and could achieve more than a
gigaflop on an NCAR ocean climate model. The machine also had 64 megawords of directly addressable central memory and a 256-million-word Solid-state Storage Device (SSD) that functioned as a dedicated high-speed disk drive.
At the time of its installation, shavano represented a
leap foward for NCAR computing facility, marking the focal point of SCD's conversion from the COS operating system to UNICOS. The shared-memory vector supercomputer was top of the line for its time, but as time marched on, it was surpassed by new technology.
