Massively Parallel Systems

In January 1998, NERSC's Cray T3E-900, "mcurie," was joined by an 96-processor Cray T3E-600, "pierre," which was installed as a mid-range computing resource primarily for Berkeley Lab researchers.

In June, pierre was upgraded to a T3E-900, with 450 MHz processors replacing the 300 MHz units and 48 additional processors installed, along with sixteen 4.5 GB disks and a multi-purpose node.

In October, the two Cray T3E supercomputers were completely rewired to create a unified machine with 640 processors available to clients. This reconfiguration reduced software costs and overall expenses, and allowed larger jobs to be run more frequently. The unified T3E kept the name "mcurie." It provides 512 processors dedicated to batch jobs and another 128 processors dedicated to interactive jobs by day and batch jobs by night, with additional processors for the operating system and serial work.