The first Cray T3D ever built. Serial number 6001. Once the fastest supercomputer in Europe
Posted by itmagic@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 16 comments
This is “Typhoon”, serial number 6001, the very first Cray T3D ever produced. It was installed at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh, and in June 1996 it ranked 22nd fastest in the world and number one in Europe on the TOP500. It’s been in private hands for over 20 years. Still wearing its original Tomato Red livery.
Kellerkind_Fritz@reddit
Wasn't this the only application of the DEC Alpha running in Big Endian mode?
CoderDevo@reddit
No. You could run Windows NT and build Windows executables for DEC Alpha in Visual Studio.
DEC VMS, too, of course, and Digital UNIX.
There were workstations and laptops that had them.
They were faster than anything Intel made at the time.
Kellerkind_Fritz@reddit
But all of those ran the alpha in Little endian mode
CoderDevo@reddit
Ah, I see.
Trying to figure out the significance (pun not intended).
Even though the T3D was the first MPP computer at Cray, it still ran Cray UNICOS which was always built for big-endian architectures. A choice likely related to Crays always having been 64-bit and used for scientific computing with large numbers . Not to mention always accessed over large networks.
So that is probably why the Alpha was flipped to big-endian in the T3D and T3E.
Kellerkind_Fritz@reddit
The reason is obvious, the Vector Cray machines where Big Endian and the intent was that you had a smaller Cray vector machine as a frontend to the T3D, having them in the same byte order makes exchanging data sets easier.
CoderDevo@reddit
Not to be easier, but to be faster.
Cray was always ready to do things a bit harder if it resulted in faster performance.
Everything they did back then was custom.
Kellerkind_Fritz@reddit
That's pedantic, making the bit level interchange formats more easy to handle makes them obviously faster.
CoderDevo@reddit
I'll be pedantic and point out that our C916 host was actually larger than our T3D.
Network architecture of a T3D:
https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cray/HR-04033_CRAY_T3D_System_Architecture_Overview_Sep93.pdf
Check out chapter 4 to see how data is exchanged between host and T3D and also how data flow can bypass the host CPU to access disk and tape and SSD through the host's IO subsystem.
Dull-Wrangler-5154@reddit
Wild to think how much faster an iPhone is than this beauty.
Loan-Pickle@reddit
I checked one time and my watch is more powerful than many of the Cray models.
CoderDevo@reddit
Cray still makes computers.
CoderDevo@reddit
It's been 30 years.
Wild to think how insignificant an iPhone speed is compared to the fastest supercomputers today.
They are a million times faster. No exaggeration.
G-I-T-M-E@reddit
Passed on Gigaflops the iPhone 17 is nearly 10 times as powerful as the top position of the 1996 Top500 list. That’s just ridiculous.
itmagic@reddit (OP)
All three are up for auction 👨⚖️
HCLB_@reddit
Its i teresting how they started with design for people and last models looks like just regular Rack cabinets
phire@reddit
No, it was designed for marketing.
They were designed to look pretty, so the super computing centres could put them on display, to help justify how much money they spend on them.
It's hard to demonstrate the practical value of a super computer, they pump out numbers. But it's very easy to point at a unique looking super computer. These supercomputer centres would put print media showing off their supercomputers, which would then act as advertising for cray.