Cray T3D: a new dimension for Cray Research

Abstract

The authors present Cray Research's massively parallel processing (MPP) philosophy, together with a brief description of the design of the Cray T3D, the first MPP designed by Cray Research. They give a brief overview of the important features of the Cray T3D, including the 3-D torus interprocessor interconnect. They discuss in more detail the motivation for the 3-D torus interconnect. Using a very simple capacity model of network performance, they show how three dimensions provide a solid balance between locality and scalability up to thousands of nodes.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>