Supercomputers/Systems/KISTI Cray T3E-900
South Korea · operational · hpc
KISTI Cray T3E-900
Also known as SERI Cray T3E-900
Operated by KISTI .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1581 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 79.6 GFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 115.2 GFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 69.1%
- Cores
- 128
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
How it compares
Ranked against the other machines in this dataset that report the same figure: those that first came into service within two years of KISTI Cray T3E-900, and those in South Korea. Computed from our tables; a metric is ranked only when at least eight peers report it.
| Metric | Value | Against its era | Against its country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rmax | 79.6 GFlop/s | #23 of 29 · bottom 22% | #31 of 32 · bottom 4% |
| Rmax ÷ Rpeak | 69.1 % | #18 of 29 · bottom 40% | #24 of 32 · bottom 27% |
Every metric is ranked largest-first, so a high power-draw rank means a big power draw, not a good one. Rmax ÷ Rpeak uses HPL-measured results only. Rankings move as machines are added; they describe this dataset, not the world.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Cray T3E-900, 128 processors | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.orghpcwire.com |
| CPU | - DEC Alpha EV5 450 MHz, 128 processors | Digital Equipment Corporation HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 128 reported | Reported | top500.org |
| Interconnect | - Cray T3E 3-D torus | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
| Operating system | - UNICOS | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | top500.org |
The read
128-processor Cray T3E-900 (DEC Alpha EV5 450 MHz, 3-D torus, UNICOS) filed by TOP500 under the KISTI Supercomputing Center, Rmax 79.59 and Rpeak 115.2 GFlop/s on the system page (the per-edition table shows 69.3 GFlop/s in June and November 1997 and 77.52 in June 1998). It first appeared at rank 33 in June 1997 and last at rank 52 in June 1998 (https://www.top500.org/system/171149/). HPCwire's 28 June 1997 item reports that the Systems Engineering Research Institute (SERI) had installed a 128-processor T3E-900 with 16 GB of memory and peak performance above 100 GFlop/s, to supplement the institute's existing Cray C916 and J916 systems used by more than 400 Korean researchers, with weather, environment and computational chemistry as first target applications. The same item quotes a 1.8 teraflops figure that belongs to the T3E-900 product family at full scale, not to this machine. SERI is the predecessor of today's KISTI (KORDIC was set up in 1993 and the institutes merged into KISTI in 2001), which is why TOP500 attributes the machine to KISTI; the older vector machine is kisti-cray-ymp-c916. TOP500 lists a further KISTI T3E900 entry with 132 cores (Rmax 82.1 GFlop/s, listed from 1999 to June 2001, https://www.top500.org/system/171150/), which looks like the same installation after an upgrade and is not separately modelled here. The shutdown date is unknown, so status is held as of the last list appearance.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-18 Added KISTI Cray T3E-900 (kisti)
Nearby in scale
The machines closest to KISTI Cray T3E-900 by Rmax, smaller to larger.
- MHPCC IBM SP2/384 · USA, operational · 0 PFlop/s
- Osaka University SX-4 · Japan, operational · 0 PFlop/s
- HWW Stuttgart NEC SX-4/32 · Germany, operational · 0 PFlop/s
- Cornell SP2/512 · USA, decommissioned · 0 PFlop/s
- KEK VPP500/80 · Japan, decommissioned · 0 PFlop/s
- Kyushu VPP700/56 · Japan, operational · 0 PFlop/s
Related systems
Same operator
- KISTI Cray Y-MP C916 · South Korea, operational, 1993
- Tachyon · South Korea, operational, 2008
- KISTI GAIA · South Korea, operational, 2009
- Tachyon II · South Korea, decommissioned, 2009
- Nurion · South Korea, operational, 2018
- KISTI-6 · South Korea, under construction
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
The interconnect
Topologies, why latency and tail behaviour matter more than bandwidth, and how the fabric market consolidated.