CRI Cray C90 - Antero 2
Cray Research, Inc.
In use: January 1, 1997 - November 30, 1999
Production use
Peak teraflops: 0.02
Processors: 16
Clock speed: 0.24GHz
Memory (terabytes): 0.00TB
Storage (terabytes): 0.25TB
Electrical power consumption: 493.50 kW
Predecessor: CRI Y-MP8i
The productivity of NCAR's Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL) was enhanced dramatically in December 1996 with the addition of a Cray C90, the second NCAR system to be named Antero. The C90 offered more than four times the computing power of the previous Antero, a Cray Y-MP/8I.
The C90 was dedicated to extensive climate simulations, providing 10,400 CPU hours per month for CSL users. The NCAR Climate System Model averaged approximately 5.2 gigaflops on the C90 and could simulate five years per day of wall-clock time. Simulating a century took less than a month.
Antero had 16 processors, a clock period of 4 nanoseconds, 256 megawords (2 gigabytes) of central memory, 8 gigabytes of solid-state disk, 250 gigabytes of disk space, and HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System.
The C90 ran the UNICOS operating system, supported the Fortran 77/90, C, and C++ compilers, and offered many vendor-supplied utilities as well as mathematical and statistical software. The machine was suitable for long-running, multitasked jobs, jobs with very large I/O requirements, and interactive and batch jobs requiring up to 48 megawords of memory.
Antero was decommissioned on November 30, 1999.