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Concept
Cray-3
Summary
The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer, Seymour Cray's designated successor to the Cray-2. The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ICs packed into a CPU. The design goal was performance around 16 GFLOPS, about 12 times that of the Cray-2.
Work started on the Cray-3 in 1988 at Cray Research's (CRI) development labs in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Other teams at the lab were working on designs with similar performance. To focus the teams, the Cray-3 effort was moved to a new lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado later that year. Shortly thereafter, the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis decided to end work on the Cray-3 in favor of another design, the Cray C90. In 1989 the Cray-3 effort was spun off to a newly formed company, Cray Computer Corporation (CCC).
The launch customer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cancelled their order in 1991 and a number of company executives left shortly thereafter. The first machine was finally ready in 1993, but with no launch customer, it was instead loaned as a demonstration unit to the nearby National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The company went bankrupt in May 1995, and the machine was officially decommissioned.
With the delivery of the first Cray-3, Seymour Cray immediately moved on to the similar-but-improved Cray-4 design, but the company went bankrupt before it was completely tested. The Cray-3 was Cray's last completed design; with CCC's bankruptcy, he formed SRC Computers to concentrate on parallel designs, but died in a car accident in 1996 before this work was delivered.
Seymour Cray began the design of the Cray-3 in 1985, as soon as the Cray-2 reached production. Cray generally set himself the goal of producing new machines with ten times the performance of the previous models. Although the machines did not always meet this goal, this was a useful technique in defining the project and clarifying what sort of process improvements would be needed to meet it.
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