Tera Computer Co has been working on the development of its MTA multithreaded architecture supercomputers for so long that most of its competitors have either gone bust or been incorporated into larger, less specialized computer companies. Founded in 1987, Seattle-based Tera shipped its first system, a two processor model, to the San Diego Supercomputer earlier this year, and has now laid out its plans for future products. The company is positioning its systems as the only available follow-on to the scientific vector machines of the past. Tera believes that Silicon Graphics Inc, which now owns Cray, is backing away from traditional vector technologies by folding them into its Origin server line in the interests of better scalability. That will leave its future Cray systems unsuitable for the really hard problems it says. For most complex and dynamic computational problems, the traditional Cray vector supercomputer architecture was clearly better than massively parallel, commodity processor-based systems, says Tera CEO Jim Rottsolk. But the question posed by most users is ‘what will follow the SGI/Cray T90?’ Tera says its Unix-based multi-threaded systems, with shared memory and very high memory bandwidths, overcome the problems of memory latency and synchronization that can be found in competitive systems. Single MTA processors can support up to 128 instruction streams without the need to alter code, and existing software applications can apparently be ported over with minimum programming effort. According to Rottsolk, Vector supercomputers like SGI’s T90 and its newly announced SV1 cannot scale uniform shared memory into the teraflops range, nor will the current Japanese supercomputer designs, like NEC’s SX-5. San Diego researchers say their system is already outperforming the Cray T90 on some applications. And using the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative’s Sweep3D benchmark for its data, Tera predicts that a 128 processor MTA system with a peak performance of around 100 GFLOPS would outperform a 9,000 processor Intel system with a peak of more than 1 TFLOPS. However, Tera is only now upgrading its two processor system in San Diego up to four processors, a task it expects to finish by the end of the month, and must wait until it can finish the development of a CMOS upgrade to its proprietary processor technology, a project that’s been underway since 1997, before it can significantly increase the number of processors in its products. Nevertheless, Tera says it will be able to ship eight processor systems by the end of the year, and systems in the range of 32 to 128 or more processors over the next two years.
