The Cydra-5 departmental supercomputer is the first minisupercomputer

Minisupercomputer

Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for...

 designed by Cydrome

Cydrome

Cydrome was a computer company started in 1984 in San Jose, California whose mission was to develop a numeric processor. The founders were David Yen, Wei Yen, Ross Towle, Arun Kumar, and Bob Rau...

. It was completed in 1987. At that time Cydra-5 cost from $0.5 million to $1 million, but achieved one-third to one-fifth performance of supercomputers which cost around $10 million to $20 million.

The Cydra-5 is a heterogeneous processor

Central processing unit

The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...

 system. There are two types of processors functionally specialized for different components of workload

Workload

-An amount of labor:While a precise definition of a workload is elusive, a commonly accepted definition is the hypothetical relationship between a group or individual human operator and task demands....

. 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.

Possibly 2 systems were delivered. CMU at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center had one.

Design philosophy

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