With the T3D, Cray research introduced a new generation of Massively Parallel Processor (MMP) super computers.
The T3D integrated from 32 to 2048 processing elements (PE's). Each PE was composed of a DEC 21064 RISC chip, also known as DEC Alpha, with its own memory area, memory controller, and prefetch queue.
The DEC Alpha contained a floating point unit, an integer unit, both with 32 64-bit registers, a 128-bit bidirectional bus, and both instruction and data caches.
The PE's were combined in nodes of 2 PE's running at 150 MHz, along with two to 64 megabytes of memory and a network switch. The nodes were connected in a 3-D torus network configuration.
Memory was physically distribued among the processors, but was globally addressable (any processor could address any memory location in the system.
The global peak performance of a T3D was from 19 (128 PE's) to 307 (2048 PE's) GigaFlops (billions floating-point operations per second).
The system ran UNICOS MAX, the Cray Research's operating system. Each processor ran a minimal microkernel to handle frequently used functions, interprocessor communication and memory management. Major programming language were C and Fortran compilers
The T3D was tightly coupled to a CRAY C90 or CRAY Y-MP host system through a high speed channel, making host's resources (I/O functionality, I/O subsystem, high-speed disks) directly available to the T3D.
The Cray T3D was replaced by the T3E, the first supercomputer to sustain one teraflop (1 trillion F.P. calculations per second).
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great PC! does it come with the guy? /gen
Tuesday 11th May 2021
Jimmothy Parr (canadian)
i was born...!
Tuesday 11th May 2021
Digby (Hong Kong)
Twenty years later (2013) a computer of equivalent performance in GFLOPS would take up to sixteen average processors (eg. Core i3 ~ 3 GHz) to build. Obviously less than 2048 CPUs, but it shows that this machine can still be called a supercomputer in terms of performance, even twenty years after its production.
Wednesday 30th January 2013
Yannis (Greece)
NAME
T3D
MANUFACTURER
Cray Research
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1993
END OF PRODUCTION
1999
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Video terminal
CPU
32 to 2048 DEC Alpha RISC processors
SPEED
150 MHz (processors) 19.2 to 307.2 GFLOPS (global system)
