Cray T3E
| Company type | Product line |
|---|---|
| Industry | Supercomputing |
| Predecessor | Cray T3D |
| Founded | November 1995 |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh , United States |
| Products | Massively parallel supercomputers (T3E-600, T3E-900, T3E-1200, T3E-1200E, T3E-1350) |
| Parent | Cray Research (until 1996), then Silicon Graphics (after acquisition) |
The Cray T3E represented the second generation of massively parallel supercomputers developed by Cray Research, officially released in November 1995. Its debut installation took place at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Building upon its forerunner, the Cray T3D, the system employed a fully distributed memory design combined with a three-dimensional torus network topology. Initially, the T3E utilized the DEC Alpha 21164 (EV5) microprocessor, supporting configurations ranging from 8 up to 2,176 Processing Elements (PEs). Each PE was equipped with between 64 MB and 2 GB of DRAM and incorporated a six-way interconnect router capable of delivering 480 MB/s bandwidth per direction. Distinct from many other MPP architectures, the T3E operated as a fully self-hosted system, running the UNICOS/mk distributed operating system alongside an integrated GigaRing I/O subsystem that managed network, disk, and tape input/output functions.
The initial model, later designated as T3E-600, ran at a clock speed of 300 MHz. Later variants featured the enhanced 21164A (EV56) processor: these included the T3E-900 at 450 MHz, T3E-1200 at 600 MHz, the memory and interconnect optimized T3E-1200E, and the highest-clocked T3E-1350 operating at 675 MHz. Both air-cooled (AC) and liquid-cooled (LC) configurations were offered; AC models supported from 16 up to 128 user PEs, whereas LC versions scaled from 64 to as many as 2048 user PEs.
In 1998, a T3E-1200 system with 1,480 processors became the first supercomputer to surpass the milestone of 1 teraflops while executing a computational science workload.
Following the acquisition of Cray Research by Silicon Graphics in February 1996, development on new Alpha-based platforms was discontinued. Although SGI continued to provide upgrades for existing T3E systems (including -900, -1200, and -1200E models), their strategic focus shifted toward migrating clients to the Origin 3000, a MIPS-based distributed shared memory architecture introduced in 2000. Nonetheless, production of the T3E line persisted even after SGI divested its Cray business within that same year.
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