BigBen was a Cray XT3 MPP system with 2068 compute nodes linked by a custom-designed interconnect.
Twenty-two dedicated IO processors were also connected to this network.
Each compute node had two 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron processors.
Bigben had two file systems comprising together over 199 TB of storage space.
Bigben had the Portland Group, the Gnu, and UPC compilers installed.