Cray MTA-2
Encyclopedia
The Cray MTA-2 is a Shared-Memory MIMD
computer marketed by Cray Inc. It is an unusual design based on the Tera computer designed by Tera Computer Company
. The original Tera computer (also known as the MTA) turned out to be nearly un-manufacturable due to its aggressive packaging and circuit technology. The MTA-2 was an attempt to correct these problems while maintaining essentially the same architecture. The name Cray was added to the second version after Tera Computer Company bought the remains of the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics
in 2000 and renamed itself Cray Inc.
The MTA-2 was not a commercial success, with only one moderately-sized system ("Boomer") being sold to the United States Naval Research Laboratory in 2002.
The MTA computers pioneered several technologies, presumably to be used in future Cray Inc. products:
MIMD
In computing, MIMD is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data...
computer marketed by Cray Inc. It is an unusual design based on the Tera computer designed by Tera Computer Company
Tera Computer Company
The Tera Computer Company was a manufacturer of high-performance computing software and hardware, founded in 1987 in Washington, D.C. and moved 1988 to Seattle, Washington by James Rottsolk and Burton Smith. The company's first supercomputer product, named MTA, featured interleaved multi-threading,...
. The original Tera computer (also known as the MTA) turned out to be nearly un-manufacturable due to its aggressive packaging and circuit technology. The MTA-2 was an attempt to correct these problems while maintaining essentially the same architecture. The name Cray was added to the second version after Tera Computer Company bought the remains of the Cray Research division of Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
in 2000 and renamed itself Cray Inc.
The MTA-2 was not a commercial success, with only one moderately-sized system ("Boomer") being sold to the United States Naval Research Laboratory in 2002.
The MTA computers pioneered several technologies, presumably to be used in future Cray Inc. products:
- A simple, whole-machine oriented programming model.
- Hardware-based multithreading.
- Low-overhead thread synchronization.