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Cray T3D
 
 
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The T3D (Torus, 3-Dimensional) was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel
Massively parallel

Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life science, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself, and in turn consists of at least one...
 supercomputer
Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research....
 architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of a non-proprietary microprocessor
Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit on a single integrated circuit . The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electronic calculators, using Binary-coded decimal arithmetic on 4-bit Word ....
 architecture in a supercomputer. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 2048 Processing Elements (PEs), each comprising a 150 MHz DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 Alpha 21064
Alpha 21064

The Alpha 21064, introduced as the DECchip 21064 and known also by its code name, EV4, is a microprocessor developed and Semiconductor device fabrication by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the DEC Alpha instruction set architecture ....
 (EV4) microprocessor and either 16 or 64 MB
Megabyte

Megabyte is a SI prefix-multiple of the unit byte for digital information computer storage or transmission and is equal to 106 bytes....
 of DRAM. PEs were grouped in pairs, or nodes, which incorporated a 6-way processor interconnect switch.






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The T3D (Torus, 3-Dimensional) was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel
Massively parallel

Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life science, medical diagnostics, and other fields.A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself, and in turn consists of at least one...
 supercomputer
Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research....
 architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of a non-proprietary microprocessor
Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit on a single integrated circuit . The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electronic calculators, using Binary-coded decimal arithmetic on 4-bit Word ....
 architecture in a supercomputer. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 2048 Processing Elements (PEs), each comprising a 150 MHz DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 Alpha 21064
Alpha 21064

The Alpha 21064, introduced as the DECchip 21064 and known also by its code name, EV4, is a microprocessor developed and Semiconductor device fabrication by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the DEC Alpha instruction set architecture ....
 (EV4) microprocessor and either 16 or 64 MB
Megabyte

Megabyte is a SI prefix-multiple of the unit byte for digital information computer storage or transmission and is equal to 106 bytes....
 of DRAM. PEs were grouped in pairs, or nodes, which incorporated a 6-way processor interconnect switch. These switches had a peak bandwidth of 300 MB/second in each direction and were connected to form a three-dimensional torus
Torus

In geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle, which does not touch the circle....
 network topology.

The T3D was designed to be hosted by a Cray Y-MP
Cray Y-MP

The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray from 1988, and the successor to the company's Cray X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits....
 Model E, M90 or C90
Cray C90

The Cray C90 series was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The C90 was a development of the Cray Y-MP architecture....
-series "front-end" system and rely on it and its UNICOS
Unicos

UNICOS is the name of a range of Unix-like operating system variants developed by Cray Inc. for its supercomputers. UNICOS is the successor of the Cray Operating System ....
 operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
 for all I/O and most system services. The T3D PEs ran a simple microkernel
Microkernel

In computer science, a microkernel is a computer kernel which provides the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system, such as low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication....
 called UNICOS MAX.

Several different configurations of T3D were available. The SC (Single Cabinet) models shared a cabinet with a host Y-MP system and were available with either 128 or 256 PEs. The MC (Multi-Cabinet) models were housed in one or more liquid-cooled cabinet(s) separately from the host, while the MCA models were smaller (32 to 128 PEs) air-cooled multi-cabinet configurations. There was also a liquid-cooled MCN model which had an alternative interconnect wiremat allowing non-power-of-2 numbers of PEs.

The Cray T3D MC cabinet had an Apple Macintosh PowerBook
PowerBook

The PowerBook is a line of Macintosh laptop computers that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Inc. from 1991 to 2006. During its lifetime, the PowerBook went through several major revisions and redesigns, often being the first to incorporate features that would later become standard in competing laptops....
 laptop built into its front. Its only purpose was to display animated Cray Research and T3D logos on its color LCD screen.

The T3D was superseded in 1995 by the faster and more sophisticated Cray T3E
Cray T3E

The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in 1995. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a fully distributed memory machine using a 3D torus topology interconnection network....
.