CSAR Cray T3E-1200E

Also known as Manchester CSAR Cray T3E

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 671.0 GFlop/s
Rpeak: 974.4 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 68.9%
Cores: 812
Power: -
Per watt: - GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- Cray built the T3E-1200E	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	cug.org top500.org
Interconnect	- Cray T3E 3-D torus interconnect	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

The Cray T3E-1200E of CSAR, one of the UK's two national supercomputing services, provided by a consortium of the University of Manchester, Computer Sciences Corporation and SGI. Mike Pettipher's May 2003 Cray User Group slides list a 576-PE Cray T3E-1200e in 1998 (about 0.7 TFlop/s) and an upgrade to 816 PEs in 2000, alongside CSAR's SGI Origin 3800 and Origin 2000. TOP500 lists the initial 612-core configuration at rank 7 in November 1998 (509 GFlop/s Rmax, https://www.top500.org/system/171030/) and the 812-core configuration from June 2000 (671 GFlop/s Rmax, 974.4 GFlop/s Rpeak, rank 14), last at rank 211 in November 2003 (https://www.top500.org/system/171035/); its core counts differ slightly from Manchester's PE counts. No shutdown date was found, so status is recorded as of the last list appearance. TOP500 is the only source for Rmax, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

1998 First operational source
1998-11 List debut at #7 (November 1998) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#7: TOP500, November 1998 →

Change history

2026-10-09 Added CSAR Cray T3E-1200E

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Every source cited on this page was readable, and none of them mentions this system. They are cited at page granularity, normally because no stable deep link could be found. That is a real weakness in this row and it is why the system carries a confidence tier below verified. See how this check works.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
cug.org	does not name this system	-
top500.org	does not name this system	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.