CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer

Citation

(1998), "CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 70 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.1998.12770baf.014

CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer

Software solutions for aerospace

CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer

Silicon Graphics has launched the CRAY T3E-1200, which it believes to be the world's most powerful supercomputer, which performs calculations at up to 2.5 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). The CRAY T3E-1200 significantly reduces the cost of supercomputer technology offering affordable solutions to customers.

The CRAY T3E-1200 launch follows the success of Silicon Graphics' first commercially available teraflops supercomputer, the CRAY T3E-900. The new system is targeted at customers in academic, aerospace, environmental, government, and petroleum. The processing power of the new system will, it is claimed, reduce the time taken on large-scale computational analysis tasks from months to days.

"We are dramatically lowering the cost of supercomputing technology to deliver affordable solutions to customers working with complex sets of data to achieve their goals. The CRAY T3E-1200's unrivalled performance realises the full potential of numerical modelling, enabling researchers to tackle intractable problems as diverse as finding new oil and gas fields, predicting severe weather conditions, and developing life-saving drugs" said Ameet Dave, UK business manager for high-performance computing, Silicon Graphics.

"Initial runs indicate that the CRAY T3E-1200 is a significant advance for extremely scalable computing," said Michael Levine, scientific director of Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "Its record-breaking performance over a wide range of codes suggests that this new model will result in significant new science in many different fields."

The CRAY T3E-1200 is a highly scalable supercomputer providing up to 2.048 600MHz processors and an increase in memory bandwidth over its predecessor, the CRAY T3E-900.

With a long history of experience with extremely scalable systems, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) was one of the most qualified sites in the world to test the new CRAY T3E-1200 model. Recently, PSC put a 20-processor CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer through its paces with several applications in such fields as materials science, brain-wave research, molecular dynamics and solid-state NMR spectroscopy.

In all of these applications, performance on the new system is reported to have far exceeded any of the previous systems at PSC. For example, LSMS, a materials science code created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and ported to the CRAY T3E-1200 supercomputer by PSC staff, achieved a sustained performance of 280 megaflops per processor, a 62 per cent improvement over the original CRAY T3E-900 supercomputer. LSMS makes it feasible to determine the structure and properties of transition metal alloys with a high degree of fidelity ­ these alloys are of interest to the computer industry for their potential use in high-capacity magnetic-storage devices.

CRAY T3E and CRAY T3E-900 customers can easily upgrade their existing systems with CRAY T3E-1200 capabilities by replacing processor modules, or by adding CRAY T3E-1200 modules to their existing systems.

"The CRAY T3E-1200's commercial potential is indicated by our strong presence in the recent listing of the top 500 supercomputer sites, in which CRAY T3E systems were named as 14 of the top 20 supercomputer sites in the world. All together, more than 70 CRAY T3E systems have been installed worldwide," said Dave.

Further background information is available on the World Wide Web at: http://www.sgi .co.uk

Details from Silicon Graphics. Tel: +44 (0) 118 9257500; Fax: +44 (0) 118 9257505.