In a major research collaboration with Cray Research Inc. (CRI), SDSC acquired a Cray T3D system, along with a Cray T3D that arrived in early 1996.

Opportunities to use the Cray T3D and Cray T3E systems for “data mining” of terabyte-sized data sets also were investigated in SDSC’s new Massive Data Analysis Testbed. The T3D had an aggregated peak speed of more than 19 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) and 64 million bytes of memory for each processor for a total of 8 gigabytes – about 4 times the total of SDSC’s Cray C90 system. The T3D also had 63 gigabytes of disk storage.