The new system delivers truly high-end supercomputing power. Working together, the three provide more than a billion calculations per second. By comparison, a person carrying out calculations day and night on a handheld calculator would require about 32 years to accomplish what the Y-MP does in a single second, or more than 1900 years to do a minute's worth of work.
More detail is given below.
A 256 million word solid-state disk and 75 billion words of magnetic disk storage round out the configuration. A great deal of critical infrastructure other than the computer itself is already in place. Clifford Hall, mentioned earlier, is a showpiece facility designed to support supercomputing, especially in applications to agriculture and earth systems science.