Enhancements for Cray T90

The new memory, called CM04, is based on double-stacked four Megabit SRAM chips. CM04 doubles the capacity and bandwidth of the original CM02 memory, which was released in 1995 with the original CRAY T90 system. CM04 delivers up to 16,384 Megabytes of central memory and up to 515 Gigabytes per second bandwidth. The CM03 memory, introduced in 1996, is based on four Megabit SSRAM (synchronous SRAM) chips and offers greater bandwidth than CM02. Both CM04 and CM03 are available now for the CRAY T90 system.

Silicon Graphics/Cray also introduced a high-performance secondary storage system that offers DRAM memory for input/output (I/O) buffering. I/O, a computer's ability to move data into and out of the system, is critical to performance on quick-turn jobs and handling multi-user environments. Silicon Graphics/Cray calls this device the CRAY SSD-T90, which delivers higher bandwidth and lower latency than disk storage, but at lower cost than central memory. This device is air cooled, which reduces operating expenses.

The Cray T90 provides nearly 60 billion Gigaflops per second of peak performance. Common applications include weather forecasting, research for governments and universities; and automobile and airline design work for improving safety, reducing manufacturing costs and accelerating design cycles.

Automotive manufacturing is the largest market segment for the CRAY T90 series. In total, there are about 20 systems installed in the automotive industry worldwide. These companies are using the system primarily for structural analysis problems for crash safety and noise vibration and harshness (NVH) applications and improved manufacturing of new car models.