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

supercomputer A supercomputer is a 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 instructions ...

s manufactured by Cray Research, Inc, superseding the Cray C90 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 In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

per processor; the high clock speed arises from the CPUs being built using ECL logic. As with the

Cray J90 The Cray J90 series (code-named ''Jedi'' during development) was an air-cooled vector processor supercomputer first sold by Cray Research in 1994. The J90 evolved from the Cray Y-MP EL minisupercomputer, and is compatible with Y-MP software, runn ...

, each CPU contained a scalar data cache, 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 established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found i ...

or traditional Cray

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

; 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 The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO), located at John C. Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi, comprises approximately 1,000 civilian, military and contract personnel responsible for providing oceanographic products and services to all ...

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 Japan, at the Ford Motor Company and at

General Motors The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...

, at

NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...

's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and at the

Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique A commissariat is a department or organization commanded by a commissary or by a corps of commissaries. In many countries, commissary is a police rank. In those countries, a commissariat is a police station commanded by a commissary. In some ar ...

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.

References

External links

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