Cray-3
The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ICs packed into a 1 cubic foot (0.028 m3) CPU.
Shortly thereafter, the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis decided to end work on the Cray-3 in favor of another design, the Cray C90.
The launch customer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cancelled their order in 1991 and a number of company executives left shortly thereafter.
The first machine was finally ready in 1993, but with no launch customer, it was instead loaned as a demonstration unit to the nearby National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
With the delivery of the first Cray-3, Seymour Cray immediately moved on to the similar-but-improved Cray-4 design, but the company went bankrupt before it was completely tested.
[3] Cray generally set himself the goal of producing new machines with ten times the performance of the previous models.
[4] For the Cray-2, he introduced a novel 3D-packaging system for its integrated circuits to allow higher densities,[6] and it appeared that there was some room for improvement in this process.
[8] Cray had intended to use gallium arsenide circuitry in the Cray-2, which would not only offer much higher switching speeds but also used less energy and thus ran cooler as well.
One of the problems with the Cray-2 had been poor multiprocessing performance due to limited bandwidth between the processors, and to address this the Cray-3 would adopt the much faster architecture used in the Cray Y-MP.
[10] At the same time, Cray Research was also working on the Y-MP, a faster multi-processor version of the system architecture tracing its ancestry to the original Cray-1.
In order to focus the Y-MP and Cray-3 groups, and with Cray's personal support,[13] the Cray-3 project moved to a new research center in Colorado Springs.
In November 1988, the Colorado Springs lab was spun off as Cray Computer Corporation (CCC), with CRI retaining 10% of the new company's stock and providing an $85 million promissory note to fund development.
The machine was being designed during the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and ending of the Cold War, which led to a massive downsizing in supercomputer purchases.
Cray was critical of this approach, and was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying that MPP systems had not yet proven their supremacy over vector computers, noting the difficulty many users have had programming for large parallel machines.
[30] As with previous designs, the core of the Cray-3 consisted of a number of modules, each containing several circuit boards packed with parts.
In order to increase density, the individual GaAs chips were not packaged, and instead several were mounted directly with ultrasonic gold bonding to a board approximately 1 inch (25 mm) square.
[31] Modern CPUs offer gate counts of millions per square inch, and the move to 3D circuits was still just being considered as of 2017[update].
[36] Much of the software available under the Cray-3 was derived from Cray Research and included for instance the X Window System, vectorizing FORTRAN and C compilers, NFS and a TCP/IP stack.
