Cray's New Solid State Storage

Sivar writes: "Cray, a well known vendor of extremely fast supercomputing hardware, has introduced a storage system with a 224 GB capacity. The large size seems impressive, but the device can also transfer an unprecedented 80GB(!!) every second. That's more bandwidth than the main memory of most servers, and it's just for storage. For comparison's sake, a typical dual channel DDR motherboard has a bandwidth capacity of barely 4.2GB/sec." Yow.

Comments

Can you imagine...

[Akardam]

... a Beowulf cluster of these?

*ducks rotten tomatoes thrown by rabid /.ers*

I'm sorry, but someone had to say it!

How the hell do you slashdot a supercomputer?

[shyster]

Wow. The /. effect is at it again. 10 comments, and Cray's (maker of "the world's most powerful supercomputers") website is barely whimpering along. After 5 server timeouts, I finally got it to load. Maybe Cray should outfit their webservers with the new storage! Here's the text for those that come after me:

CRAY INC. OFFERS WORLD'S HIGHEST-CAPABILITY EXPANSION MEMORY/DATA TRANSFER SYSTEM

System Can Transfer 100 Copies of Human Genome Per Second and Quickly Handle Other Very Large, Data-Intensive Problems

SEATTLE (April 8, 2002) - Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced the availability of the world's highest-capability expansion memory and data transfer system. The new system, compatible with Cray SV1e(TM) and Cray SV1ex(TM) supercomputers, includes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per second-800 or more times faster than the 10- to 100-megabytes/second speeds typical with today's disk servers.

The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second. With their 32-gigabyte central memories and the new SSD system, Cray SV1(TM) series supercomputers now provide up to a quarter terabyte of ultrafast memory. They can also be linked to a virtually unlimited number of standard disk servers for additional capacity, and to other computer systems via high-speed networking.

"With the new SSD system, Cray SV1 series supercomputers can handle extremely large, data-intensive problems with unprecedented speed, convenience and cost-effectiveness," said Jerry Loe, Cray vice president of worldwide sales and service. "This will be particularly useful in bioinformatics, and for complex automotive and aerospace applications." The Cray SV1 series, named "Best Supercomputer" in 2001 by the readers of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine, includes special hardware features for bioinformatics.

"With the new SSD, bioinformaticists will be able to work with several copies of the Human Genome at a time, or perform whole genome comparisons, or pursue drug design and discovery, without wasting valuable compute time waiting for standard disk data transfers," said Jef Dawson, Cray's manager of bioinformatics development and marketing. "The SSD can keep up with the Cray SV1 parallel supercomputers' processors, which perform up to 12 operations per clock cycle."

Dawson said the SSD will benefit virtually any application requiring large data sets. "The popular automotive application MSC/Nastran ran 2.5 times faster using the new SSD capability. Applications that run 'out of core,' including the popular GAUSSIAN chemistry codes, are also well suited to the SSD. You can think of the SSD as the world's biggest cache memory, or the world's biggest I/O buffer. Either way, it offers the world a new capability."

For more information on the Cray SV1ex series, visit www.cray.com or contact your local Cray sales representative.

Don't forget the legalese on forward looking statements, and registered trademarks as well.

Even more impressive...

[Dynedain]

What makes this even more impressive is that (as the article says) this is solid state storage. Not a magnetic system. Damm I want some!

Re:Transferring my genome

[Bruha]

*dies*

I'm sorry 5 was a understatement for this being funny.

Best laugh I've had all day. Back to crying about being laid off by Verizon (backstab) Wireless.

Need an network engineer?