The Cray T90 series (code-named ''Triton'' during development) was the last of a line of

vector processing In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its Instruction (computer science), instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large Array d ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s manufactured by

Cray Research Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

, Inc, superseding the

Cray C90 The Cray C90 series (initially named the Y-MP C90) was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The C90 was a development of the Cray Y-MP architecture. Compared to the Y-MP, the C90 processor had a dual vector pipeline ...

series. The first machines were shipped in 1995, and featured a 2.2 ns (450 MHz) clock cycle and two-wide vector pipes, for a peak speed of 1.8 gigaflops per processor; the high clock speed arises from the CPUs being built using ECL logic. As with the Cray J90, each CPU contained a scalar

data cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

, in addition to the instruction buffering/caching which has always been in Cray architectures. Configurations were available with between four and 32 processors, and with either

IEEE 754 The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic originally established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard #Design rationale, add ...

or traditional Cray

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

; the processors shared an SRAM main memory of up to eight gigabytes, with a bandwidth of three 64-bit words per cycle per CPU (giving a 32-CPU STREAM bandwidth of 360 gigabytes per second). The clock signal is distributed via a fiber-optic harness to the processors. The T90 series was available in three variants, the T94 (one to four processors), T916 (eight to 16 processors) and T932 (16 to 32 processors). It is widely considered as being slightly ahead of the state of the art at the time it was shipped; the systems were never particularly reliable. At launch, a 32-processor T932 cost $35 million. Cray T90 systems were installed at, amongst other places, at least three US government sites, at NAVOCEANO in Mississippi (Bay St. Louis) USA, at NTT and

NIED The Nied (; ) is a river in Lorraine, France, and Saarland, Germany. It is a left tributary of the Saar. It is formed where two streams converge: the ''Nied allemande'' ("German Nied") and the ''Nied française'' ("French Nied"), which join in C ...

in Japan, at the

Ford Motor Company Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational corporation, multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. T ...

and at

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

, at

NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploratio ...

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a laboratory in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). The current director is Venkatachalam Ramaswamy. It is one of seven ...

, at

Forschungszentrum Jülich Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ; “Jülich Research Centre”) is a German national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates a broad range of research infrast ...

in Germany, and at the

Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA ( French: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives), is a French public government-funded research organisation in the areas of energy, defense and sec ...

in France. The system chassis weighs , contains of

fluorinert Fluorinert is the trademarked brand name for the line of electronics coolant liquids sold commercially by 3M. As perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), all Fluorinert variants have an extremely high global warming potential (GWP), so should be used with ...

coolant, and is approximately the shape and size of a very large chest freezer, paneled in black and gold plastic. Its successor, some years after the last T90s shipped, was the

Cray X1 The Cray X1 is a non-uniform memory access, vector processor supercomputer manufactured and sold by Cray Inc. since 2003. The X1 is often described as the unification of the Cray T90, Cray SV1, and Cray T3E architectures into a single machine. ...

References

External links

Top 500 Supercomputer sites
(PDF) {{Cray computers Computer-related introductions in 1995 T90 Vector supercomputers