Cray T3E
The Cray T3E is a massively parallel multiprocessor computer with distributed memory (Distributed Memory MIMD ), which was designed by the Cray company in the 1990s and replaced the previous Cray T3D model in 1995 . The T3E consisted of 8 to 2176 so-called Processing Elements (PEs), each consisting of a DEC Alpha 21164 (EV5) microprocessor clocked at 300 MHz , between 64 MB and 2 GB of RAM and a 6-way switch that has a maximum Bandwidth of 480 MB / second in both directions. As with the T3D, the PEs were connected to form a three-dimensional toroidal body .
One of the biggest differences to the T3D (and many other MPP systems) was that the T3E no longer required a host computer and even ran under the UNICOS / mk operating system (the individual servers of which (as with MACH ) were run on different PEs). The I / O subsystem, Cray's " GigaRing ", which provided the network, disk and tape I / O, was integrated directly into the torus.
There were several versions of the T3E:
- The original version, subsequently referred to as T3E-600 .
- The T3E-900 , whose processors were clocked at 450 MHz,
- the T3E-1200 with 600 MHz processor speed,
- the T3E-1200E , in which the speed of the memory and the connections of the PEs have been improved,
- and the T3E-1350 , the processor speed of which has been increased to 675 MHz.
Starting with the T3E-900, the 21164 (EV5) was no longer used for the PEs, but the faster 21164A (EV56).
All versions were offered both air-cooled ("Air Cooled", AC ) and liquid-cooled ("Liquid Cooled", LC ). Depending on this, 16 to 128 PEs (air-cooled) or 64 to 2048 PEs (liquid-cooled) could be used.
A T3E was the first supercomputer to achieve a performance of over 1 TFLOPS while running a scientific application ; the application was executed in 1998 on a T3E-1200 with a configuration of 1480 PEs (see external link).
