NCAR Cray T3D

Also known as CRI Cray T3D

Operated by NCAR at NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder) .

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: 1263 of 1345 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 56 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: -
Rpeak: 19.2 GFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: -
Cores: 128
Power: 41.4 kW
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 Research, Inc. Cray T3D, 64 processors upgraded to 128 in 1997	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	cisl.ucar.edu en.wikipedia.org
CPU	- Cray T3D processing elements at 150 MHz, 128 after the 1997 upgrade	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	128 reported	Reported	cisl.ucar.edu
Operating system	- UNICOS MAX	Cray HPENYSE rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise	-	Reported	cisl.ucar.edu

The read

NCAR's T3D came online on 1 July 1994 as a massively parallel system with 64 processors, doubled to 128 in a 1997 upgrade. NCAR gives 1,024 megawords (8 GB) of memory, a 6.67 ns clock, about 41.4 kW and a 19.2 GFLOPS peak. It was funded jointly by the US High Performance Computing and Communications Program and the Global Change Research Program and was used mainly by the NCAR Climate Simulation Laboratory. It was tightly coupled to the Cray C90 Antero and had no system name of its own; it ran UNICOS MAX. NCAR stopped maintenance in December 1998, operated it until 1 June 1999, and removed it to make room for the IBM SP Blackforest. The core count is the post-1997 figure. NCAR is the primary source, so the tier is reported.

Timeline

1994-07 First operational source
1999-06 Decommissioned source

Site & facility

NCAR Mesa Laboratory (Boulder)

Location: Boulder, CO, USA
Commissioned: 1986

cisl.ucar.edu cisl.ucar.edu

Change history

2026-10-09 Added NCAR Cray T3D

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.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
en.wikipedia.org	names system only	-
cisl.ucar.edu	names system only	-

Checked 2026-10-13 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.