Cray Computer Corporation Status: Not active. Overview of Organization:

In 1985, as soon as the Cray-2 had reached production, Seymour Cray and team started work on the Cray-3, which was to be a GaAs implementation of the Cray-2. It was thought that GaAs technology would be viable by 1988/89, which was the original production target date for the new machine. However, the Cray-3 is still not available and is not expected until 1991 at the earliest.
Some of this delay is due to problems with using advanced technology, especially in the area of packaging, and some is due to the physical moves the project has made. In the spring of 1988, the Cray-3 project moved from Chippewa Falls to Colorado Springs. This was done to focus the project on the Cray-3, since Chippewa Falls was mainly geared to producing the Y-MP. In November 1989, the Cray Research Inc. (CRI) management decided that it could no longer support both the C90 and Cray-3 projects. The most promising project was the C90, so to avoid closing down Seymour Cray’s own project, the development of the Cray-3 was spun off into a new company called Cray Computer Corporation (CCC). Cray Research transferred a facility and other equipment to CCC, along with an $85 million promissory note to fund future development of the Cray-3. Cray Research hold 10% of the stock of CCC, the other 90% of stock being distributed among Cray Research stockholders. This has prompted another change in location for the Cray-3 project and caused more delays.
CRI dealt with Rockwell for the GaAs chips for the original design of the Cray-2. By the time the Cray-3 was being designed a small spin-off company from Rockwell called Gigabit had started up; they now supply the Cray-3 project with chips.
In November 1988, at a supercomputing conference in Florida, Seymour Cray described the architecture, technology and packaging of the Cray-3, and some design targets for the Cray-4. The Cray-3 will be 12 times faster than the Cray-2. A factor of three speedup will come from the use of GaAs technology, which will give the Cray-3 a 2 ns clock cycle. The remainder will come from using four times as many processors as in the Cray-2. Seymour Cray noted that one problem with the Cray-2 was its primitive interprocessor communication mechanism. As a result, the Cray-3 will use the communication architecture of the Y-MP series. The expected performance of the Cray-3 will be 8000 MIPS or 16 GFLOPS. it will have 512 Mword of main memory.
The entire machine will fit inside a cuboid cabinet measuring 1′ on each side. The reason for the small size is that reducing the machine’s linear dimensions by a factor of three gives a corresponding improvement in speed, but a reduction in volume of 27. The maximum allowable wire length throughout the machine is one foot. Producing a machine of such tiny proportions requires radical packaging technology, an area in which Seymour Cray excels. Each processor will be constructed from four modules. The whole machine, including the central memory, will be built from 200 modules, each contain 1024 VLSI circuits, and be built from circuit wafers stacked and bonded together. The machine will be liquid cooled using technology developed for the Cray-2.
The largest problem faced on the Cray-3 project is how to automate machine production. There are many connections to be made in using a complex interconnection scheme. To do this, laser welding and cutting equipment is required, as is robot assembly technology. Seymour Cray is already thinking about the Cray-4. This is likely to have a 1 ns dock and will test the limits of GaAs technology.
After the Cray-4, he expects that a new material will be needed, possibly indium phosphate layers on a silicon substrate. “Cray-3 to have up to 8 dual-CPUs (i.e., a maximum of 16 vector processors), connected to a maximum of 4GB of central memory, with an interprocessor communication mechanism architecture based on the Cray Y-MP”; “One-foot cube for entire [Cray-3] machine, immersed in inert liquid fluorocarbon for optimum cooling”;