The Jim Austin Computer Collection
The Cray T3E AC
The machine at the Met Office
The Cray 3TE was used by the UK metrological office until the end of 2002. It was bought for doing the year 2000 software tests. The AC denotes that its an air cooled system.
The machine has the following specification:
28 Processor elements
256Mb per processor, with 512Mb on 4 processors.
Total memory size 5Gb
Disk storage size 72Gb
peak performance 600Mflops per processor, 16.8Gflops total for this machine (28 processors).
Size: Height 1836mm, Width 728mm, Length 1525mm
Details of the machine can be found at met office web site, the machine is the test machine listed at the end of the page:
http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical/computers/t3e.html
Some pictures of the system
The machine in the machine room in the met office. The cabinet on the left is the disk unit. The Sun console for the machine is on the table to the left.
This is a picture of one processor card from the machine. Four processor modules can be seen. The back of this is covered in cooling fins. This is very heavy!
This is a close up of the processor card.
This is a picture of the interconnect between the cards. The system has no backplane, just a set of individual interconnect cables. The processors can be seen at the bottom.
This is a picture of me undoing the two cabinets, unwiring the processors!
Here we have the machine in the van (after some hours of effort). I am on the right, Kevin is on the left.