The MTA can have up to 256 processors by design. However, to date only an 8-processor machine has been built. The MTA is designed to perform well on highly parallel, memory-intensive problems such as raycasting. Programming Model Contrasted to Others Like mainstream supercomputers built from commodity processors, such as the Cray T3E, memory in the MTA is physically distributed and globally addressable. Unlike these, however, the MTA has no local memory.
All memory is remote from all processors.
Our MTA configuration has 8 gigabytes of memory. Instead of each processor having its own memory and exchanging data via messages, all processors can write directly to all memory. This scheme greatly simplifies the programming model. The task of the programmer, with assistance from the compiler, is to express parallelism. Concerns of data placement are abstracted away.