The company was announcing an order a week or so up to about a year ago, since when all has been quiet – but not much longer. It was the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center that let the cat out of the bag when it said that it would be the first to get one of the things next year, and today’s Unigram.X reports that Cray Research Inc already has some $90m orders booked for the T3E follow-on to the Alpha RISC-based massively parallel T3D. The T3E is due to be launched this month for ships at the beginning of next year, and Cray promises that T3Es will support more and faster Alphas than the 128 in the T3D and will have additional memory. It’s also supposed to come with a full microkernel implementation of the Unicos operating system, which was previously a Unix-based hybrid. Last year Cray was also promising a version of ToolTalk messaging and an implementation of the Common Desktop Environment Unix front-end.
CRAY IS READY WITH BIGGER, FASTER MASSIVELY PARALLEL T3E
