The week of 10-14 April 2000, the CRAY C90 named antero was disassembled and removed, piece by piece (via dollies, forklifts, and a giant crane) from the NCAR Computer Room. Loaded onto two awaiting semis, it was then shipped back to its place of origin, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The teardown was an impressive engineering feat: the C90's main CPU and Solid-State Disk weighed more than seven tons, and it took a team of a dozen crane operators, movers, Cray engineers, and SCD staffers to dismantle and remove the giant vector machine.

The C90 was installed at NCAR in December 1996 and served NCAR scientists for three years. As the linchpin of the Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL), it was dedicated to extensive climate models, providing 10,400 CPU hours per month for CSL users. Averaging approximately 5.2 gigaflops on the NCAR Climate System Model, it could simulate five years of climate per day of wall-clock time.

Antero had 16 processors, 256 megawords of central memory, a 1-gigaword Solid-State Disk, 250 gigabytes of disk space, a clock period of 4 nanoseconds, and HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System. It was a valuable supercomputer in its time -- a true "Big Iron" -- but rising maintenance costs and the high-performance computing industry's transition to distributed shared-memory (DSM) computer architectures made its support at NCAR no longer economically or technologically feasible.

Antero was decommissioned on 30 November 1999 and lay dormant until it was dismantled in April 2000.

For more information and pictures, see the CRAY C90 page of the SCD Supercomputer Gallery and "Fantastic voyage," a photo look at the inside of the C90 from the Fall 1997 issue of SCDzine.