The first supercomputer to ever reach the limit of one TFLOPS was the Cray T3E in a scientific application in 1998. Despite exceeding the limit, the T3E has a higher theoretical computing power of 1,2TFLOPS. Because of the new liquid cooling, the T3E can have up to 2176 processing elements, or PEs for short, and was therefore able to reach this limit. However, the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) only achieved a maximum computing performance of 524 GigaFLOPS.
All of these PEs resulted in a power consumption of around 200kW.
In contrast to the T3E's predecessor, the T3D, it could also be operated without a host computer because it runs on the UNICOS/mk operating system.
The Cray T3E can have up to 2GB of main memory.
The T3E was installed at the ZIB in February 1997 and was decommissioned in January 2004.
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