True to its word, Cray Research Inc yesterday chose Tokyo for the worldwide launch of its Triton top-end supercomputer, billing the machine as the world’s first wireless supercomputer and calling it the T90. The wireless claim relates to the fact that electrically activated zero-insertion-force connectors replace over 36 miles of internal wiring in the C916: each connector has 400 signal contacts and replaces 800 interconnect wires, and modules are installed or removed by applying low voltage to operate the heat-controlled spring on each connector. The processor is built in 50,000-gate Emitter-Collector-Dotted logic chips designed with Motorola Inc in place of the 10,000-gate arrays in the C90 series. The new chips offer four-fold increase in logic density and reduce power requirements: a programmable power feature enables critical paths within the chips to run at full power while support signals are run at slower speeds, thus lower power. The five circuit board module types – CPU, memory, input-output, boundary scan support and share, is smaller than an A4 sheet and have up to 52 layers, up from 22 in the C90; each board is made up of three boards laminated together using a direct solder technique. The T90 uses 4M-bit BiCMOS static memory devices with 15nS access time, with 40 stacked on top of each other to eliminating the need for packaging. And despite all the techniques used to get everything as close as possible, the possibility of clock delays is still present, so an optical clock system is used to distribute the phases of the 2nS clock reliably to all logic modules in the system. The machine goes from one to 32 processors – models at all performance levels are being launched simultaneously – compared with 16 maximum on the C90. Cray rates the top end T932 model at 60 GFLOPS peak, up from 16 GFLOPS on the C916, and price-performance is increased three- to fivefold. T90 systems run under Unicos Unix and operate in either native T90 mode – recompilation needed, or in C90-compatible mode, and initially come with Cray floating-point; 64-bit IEEE floating-point capability will be offered next year. There are three chassis options: the T94 comes with one to four processors, 512Mb to 1Gb of memory and can be air-cooled; it starts at $2.5m for a uniprocessor. The T916 has eight to 16 CPUs, 1Gb to 4Gb memory, and costs from $9.5m for an eight-processor system with 1Gb memory. And the top-end T932 has 16 to 32 processors, 4Gb to 8Gb memory and must be liquid cooled. It costs from $22m to $35m. Some systems will ship before mid-year, and the company has eight orders, two from unnamed Japanese industrial firms; one each at Chrysler Corp; North Carolina Supercomputing Center; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and three other customers are confidential.
