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The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation 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 architecture, launched in 1995. Like the previous Cray T3D
Cray T3D

The T3D was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of a non-proprietary microprocessor architecture in a supercomputer....
, it was a fully distributed memory machine using a 3D 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....
 topology interconnection network. The T3E initially used the 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 21164
Alpha 21164

The Alpha 21164, also known by its code name, EV5, is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the DEC Alpha instruction set architecture ....
 (EV5) 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 ....
 and was designed to scale from 8 to 2,176 Processing Elements (PEs). Each PE had between 64 MB and 2 GB of DRAM
Dram

Dram or DRAM may refer to:* Dram , an imperial unit of mass and volume* Armenian dram, a monetary unit* Dynamic random access memory* Database of Recorded American Music...
 and a 6-way interconnect router with a payload bandwidth of 480 MB/s in each direction.






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The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation 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 architecture, launched in 1995. Like the previous Cray T3D
Cray T3D

The T3D was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of a non-proprietary microprocessor architecture in a supercomputer....
, it was a fully distributed memory machine using a 3D 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....
 topology interconnection network. The T3E initially used the 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 21164
Alpha 21164

The Alpha 21164, also known by its code name, EV5, is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation that implemented the DEC Alpha instruction set architecture ....
 (EV5) 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 ....
 and was designed to scale from 8 to 2,176 Processing Elements (PEs). Each PE had between 64 MB and 2 GB of DRAM
Dram

Dram or DRAM may refer to:* Dram , an imperial unit of mass and volume* Armenian dram, a monetary unit* Dynamic random access memory* Database of Recorded American Music...
 and a 6-way interconnect router with a payload bandwidth of 480 MB/s in each direction. Unlike many other MPP systems, including the T3D, the T3E was fully self-hosted and ran the 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 ....
/mk distributed operating system with a GigaRing I/O subsystem integrated into the torus for network, disk and tape I/O.

Processor Board Cray 2 Hg
The original T3E (retrospectively known as the T3E-600) had a 300 MHz processor clock. Later variants, using the faster 21164A (EV56) processor, comprised the T3E-900 (450 MHz), T3E-1200 (600 MHz), T3E-1200E (with improved memory and interconnect performance) and T3E-1350 (675 MHz). The T3E was available in both air-cooled (AC) and liquid-cooled (LC) configurations. AC systems were available with 16 to 128 user PEs, LC systems with 64 to 2048 user PEs.

A 1480-processor T3E-1200 was the first supercomputer to achieve a performance of more than 1 teraflops running a computational science
Computational science

Computational science is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical solution techniques and using computers to analyse and solve scientific, social science and engineering problems....
 application, in 1998.

After Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. is a company manufacturer high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and computer software. SGI was founded by James H....
 in February 1996, development of new Alpha-based systems was stopped. While providing the -900, -1200 and -1200E upgrades to the T3E, in the long term Silicon Graphics intended Cray T3E users to migrate to the Origin 3000, a MIPS
MIPS architecture

MIPS is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . In the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS implementations....
-based distributed shared memory
Distributed shared memory

Distributed Shared Memory , also known as a distributed global address space , is a term in computer science that refers to a wide class of software and hardware implementations, in which each node of a computer cluster has access to a large shared memory in addition to each node's limited non-shared private memory....
 computer, introduced in 2000. However, the T3E continued in production after SGI sold the Cray business the same year.

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