The Cray T90 was the last of a line of vector-processing supercomputers manufactured by Cray Research, Inc. The first machines were shipped in 1995, and featured a 450MHz clock cycle and four-wide vector pipes, for a peak speed of 1.8Gflops per processor; the high clock speed arises from the CPUs' being built using logic. Configurations were available with between 4 and 32 processors, and with either IEEE or traditional-Cray floating point arithmetic; the processors shared an SRAM main memory of up to eight gigabytes, with a bandwidth of three 64-bit words per cycle per CPU (giving a 32-CPU Stream bandwidth of 360 gigabytes per second). The clock signal is distributed via a fibre-optic harness to the processors.

It is widely considered as being slightly ahead of the state of the art at the time it was shipped; the systems were never particularly reliable. At launch, a 32-processor T932 cost $39 million.

Cray T90 systems were installed, amongst other places, at at least three US government sites, at NAVOCEANO in St Louis USA, at NTT and NIED in Japan, at the Ford Motor Company and at General Motors, at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, at the Forschungscentrum Juelich in Germany, and at the Commisariat à l'Energie Atomique in France.

The system chassis weighs ten tons and contains four tons of fluorinert coolant; it is approximately the shape and size of a very large chest freezer, and panelled in black and gold plastic.

Its successor, some years after the last T90s shipped, was the Cray X1.

References

• Top 500 Supercomputer sites: Comparison of J90(se) and T90
• Armari, Seymour Cray and a giant gold sarcophagus
• Top 500 Supercomputer sites (PDF)