No, not quite — their interconnects are very impressive. It's true that they don't make CPUs anymore, but that stopped making sense a long time ago. If you want to be a supercomputer company these days the value is in the interconnect and software.
Surely also in the cooling systems. I remember on my visits to the Edinburgh supercomputing center, the quip was that Cray were a refrigeration company first. Like Tesla is a battery manufacturer.
That will have been for HECToR, an old XE system. They use the ECOphlex system which is a liquid evaporative phase-change cooling system using tetrafluoroethane.
The current XC line of supercomputers from Cray utilize more conventional cooling methods.
Oh, this was much further back. The last time I set foot in the JCMB was around 1996. I think the main workhorses of the day were a Cray T3D/T3E. ISTR there was a Y-MP in there as well.
Their XC-series systems with Aries interconnect are very solid and dense systems. Even without their special interconnect and system management software, their software stack for developers and users is very mature and well supported by some of the best in the industry.
