Cray T3D: a new dimension for Cray Research

The authors present Cray Research´s massively parallel processing (MPP) philosophy, together with a brief description of the design of the Cray T3D, the first MPP designed by Cray Research. They give a brief overview of the important features of the Cray T3D, including the 3-D torus interprocessor interconnect. They discuss in more detail the motivation for the 3-D torus interconnect. Using a very simple capacity model of network performance, they show how three dimensions provide a solid balance between locality and scalability up to thousands of nodes.<>