Just weeks after it announced it had built the world’s most powerful and biggest commercially available supercomputer, the T3E-900 (CI No 3,275), Cray Research has come up with an even more powerful machine. The T3E-1200, which has the potential to scale up to 2,048 processors succeeds the T3E-900 model, taking on board a 600MHz processor and an increase in memory. Cray, now owned by Silicon Graphics Inc, has decided to chop the price of its supercomputer from $166 per megaflop to $64 per megaflop, in order to make the more powerful machine affordable. To date, Cray has sold 70 of the T3E supercomputers since they were announced back in September last year, the computers selling on average for $5m a piece. Cray is targeting the machine at customers in the university research, environmental, aerospace and petroleum markets, and has already sold one of the monster machines to the US Army High Performance Computer Research Centre in Minneapolis. Cray is already working on the next T3E model, and will make a formal announcement relating to its performance in the first half of next year.
