CDC STAR-100

The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation (CDC). It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications.

The name STAR was a construct of the words STrings and ARrays. The 100 came from 100 million floating point operations per second (MFLOPS), the speed at which the machine was designed to operate. The computer was announced very early during the 1970s and was supposed to be several times faster than the CDC 7600, which was then the world's fastest supercomputer with a peak performance of 36 MFLOPS. On August 17, 1971, CDC announced that General Motors had placed the first commercial order for a STAR-100.

A number of basic design features of the machine meant that its real world performance was much lower than expected when first used commercially in 1974, and was one of the primary reasons CDC was pushed from its former dominance in the supercomputer market when the Cray-1 was announced in 1975.