The Cray MTA-2 is a shared-memory
MIMD
In computing, multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be exe ...
computer marketed by
Cray Inc.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...
It is an unusual design based on the Tera computer designed by
Tera Computer Company
The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of high-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C. and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith. The company's first supercomputer pro ...
. The original Tera computer (also known as the ''MTA'') turned out to be nearly unmanufacturable due to its aggressive packaging and circuit technology. The MTA-2 was an attempt to correct these problems while maintaining essentially the same processor architecture respun in one silicon ASIC, down from some 26 gallium arsenide ASICs in the original MTA; and while regressing the network design from a 4-D torus topology to a less efficient but more scalable
Cayley graph
In mathematics, a Cayley graph, also known as a Cayley color graph, Cayley diagram, group diagram, or color group is a graph that encodes the abstract structure of a group. Its definition is suggested by Cayley's theorem (named after Arthur Cay ...
topology. The name ''Cray'' was added to the second version after Tera Computer Company bought the remains of the Cray Research division of
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...
in 2000 and renamed itself Cray Inc.
The MTA-2 was not a commercial success, with only one moderately-sized 40-processor system ("Boomer") being sold to the United States
Naval Research Laboratory
The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological ...
in 2002, and one 4-processor system sold to the Electronic Navigation Research Institute (ENRI) in Japan.
The MTA computers pioneered several technologies, presumably to be used in future Cray Inc. products:
* A simple, ''whole-machine''-oriented programming model.
* Hardware-based multithreading.
* Low-overhead thread synchronization.
See also
*
Cray MTA The Cray MTA, formerly known as the Tera MTA, is a supercomputer architecture based on thousands of independent threads, fine-grain communication and synchronization between threads, and latency tolerance for irregular computations.
Each MTA proce ...
*
Heterogeneous Element Processor
The Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP) was introduced by Denelcor, Inc. in 1982. The HEP's architect was Burton Smith. The machine was designed to solve fluid dynamics problems for the Ballistic Research Laboratory. A HEP system, as the nam ...
References
External links
Utrecht University HPCG - Cray MTA-2 page
{{Cray computers
Mta-2
Supercomputers