Wanna know about the Cray Research Inc prototype T3D massively parallel Alpha RISC-based machine that was unveiled at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center last week (CI No 2,245)? So do we, but we’re all have to tap our feet and drum our fingers until the end of the month when the machine is formally announced – at Pittsburgh, Cray just took the wraps off the box, and said nothing about the workings of the innards; all we can tell you is that the T3D delivered to Pittsburgh has 32 Alpha processors, and is expected to grow in excess of 10 times its current size within six months and be many times faster than the Cray C90 parallel vector supercomputer already at the centre, which has a peak theoretical speed of 16GFLOPS and will work with the T3D; Pittsburgh Supercomputing and Cray agreed joint development of applications for the T3D.
