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Cray XD1 Now Available
cyngus writes "Cray announced the availability of their XD1 systems. Each XD1 chassis has up to 12 AMD Operton processors. Up to 12 chassis can be clustered together in a rack. The XD1 uses Cray RapidArray Interconnect technology, based on HyperTransport, for high bandwidth and low latency communications between processors and chassises. The XD1 also has a handful of other technologies aimed at the HPC market, including Xilinx FPGAs, communications accelerators, etc."
Being based on Opteron, any x86 software will run on it. Maybe without all the bells and whistles though. But Openmosix can solve most of those problems.
Dr Cray was killed in 1995(in think thats the year) when his SUV was T-boned by a short car and rolled over.
I only know this from a Sci-Am article on using supercomputers to predict crash situation.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Hes dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 - October 5, 1996) was a supercomputer architect who founded the company Cray Research. For about 30 years, the short answer to the question "What company makes the fastest computer?" was "Wherever Seymour Cray is working now."
From the linked page:
Highly modular, the Cray XD1 base unit is a chassis. Up to 12 chassis can be installed in a rack. Multirack configurations integrate hundreds of processors into a single system.
Farther down the same page:
The Cray XD1 compute subsystem is composed of 12 AMD Opteron(TM) 64-bit processors that run Linux and are organized as six 2-way SMPs to deliver 58 GFLOPs* per chassis. Finely tuned memory and I/O performance removes bottlenecks and maximizes processor performance.
Wow - do the math: 696 GFLOPs per chassis. That's rather impressive.
However, part of me is a bit saddened by seeing the Cray name attached to X86s. Yes, I felt the same thing with SGI, DEC, and Sun. Yes, I need to get over it and move on.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Yes, I believe it is 12-way SMP. The memory is connected to the CPU's in a crossbar switch.
Cray has announced a lot of different sales of the XD1 the past couple of weeks. We have all the details here.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
the nec SX architecture uses these ridiculously huge custom vector processors to get performance (similar to the Cray 1, 2, XMP, YMP, etc design)
this Cray is more like building MPPs off of scalar units (opterons) and doing some real innovation around the MPP interconnect. It's sort of off the shelf, yet not at the same time.
The big thing here that kicks ass is the 6 FPGAs per chassis. If you can write a highly tuned software algorithm, there's a chance you can write a highly tuned peice of hardware, deploy that to the FPGA, and you've got an application specific hardware accelerator. 6 per chassis, infact. That's pretty cool, and its in some ways a HUGE innovation over having a dedicated vector unit (as was the cray1 design).
the really interesting thing here is that these are essentially opterons running linux, with custom interconnect goo. The interconnect bypasses the PCI bus - its closer to the PE's than that.. their claim is that it attaches to the AMD hypertransport bus (the Proc -> Proc -> Mem bus for SMP AMD machines)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Cray did not develop this system themselves, they simply bought this little startup company and relabled its product.
i was looking at cray.com and there's no mention of the Tera MTA. The Tera MTA was the innovative idea they had to have 128 logical threads on a single CPU.. think of hyperthreading but with 128 logical threads instead of.. 2.. and also it was working at least 8 years ago.
:/
If you look at cray.com today its pretty sad. 3 product lines - the TD1 opteron+magic, the X1, which is traditional cray vector (smp vector nodes, and MPP's of those nodes), and their 3rd product line is the NEC SX-6... they're reselling it in the states for NEC.
If you hit tera.com, you get a 404
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Having Linux or any other OS (or even CPU type functions) on the FPGA would be a waste of gates. The gates would be better spent for specialized vector operations, such as an FFT or crypto engine.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
This machine is really not much different to SGI's Altix, except running the AMD processors rather than Intel. This means that although each processor likely runs faster than the ones SGI uses, Cray can't bundle as many together, as AMD hasn't progressed nearly as far on SMP-aware chipsets as Intel.
This is some of the stupidest piles of drivel I have read on slashdot. SGI and Cray both do ALL of the glue logic chips themselves, that's the whole point of buying from them. They don't use the off the shelf chipset, they design their own with the design goal of large scalable systems. Besides Intel uses a shared bus where AMD uses the point to point bus they bought from Compaq which was origionally designed for the Alpha. So if anyone has a scalability lead it's AMD.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If you can't afford this Cray, you can at least buy the parts to start putting together your own multi-processor Opteron system:
:-\
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/
A friend of mine and I were talking the other night about local Atlanta, GA computer stores, and he mentioned that Monarch Computer is one of the only vendors from whom you can purchase the 4-way Opteron 800 series processors ($1200 a piece -- damn!).
He's been in grad school out of state for a few years and was suprised to learn that Monarch Computer is, in fact, in his hometown backyard. Kind of kewl to walk in a store in your own town and walk out with a $1200 4-way processor.
Until the wife finds out and sends you back to said store with the receipt in hand for a refund.
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - I don't work for these guys or advocate their store. I just thought it was cool to have such a vendor nearby. Too bad they don't sell Shuttle XPCs.
The MTA idea is neat, but nobody's ever been able to find a problem that runs all that well on them. The original MTA didn't have enough memory bandwidth to make it competitve with a vector machine, and the small number of them in the field (less than 10 IIRC) are notoriously cantankerous. When Tera bought Cray, the one of the main things they were buying, aside from name recognition, was Cray's CMOS design experience; they were hoping Cray's designers could help with the problems they'd run into with MTA.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
I forget where I snipped this from, but here goes:
Cray now has three product lines to address 3 different market segments.
They have the X1, which is a massively parallel vector system for the very high-end. (For those who need 30+Gbytes/second of memory bandwidth for EACH cpu) These things are huge, expensive, and used by a limited number of users, mostly governments.
They are getting ready to productize red storm, which is also a bunch of opterons, but strung together in a shared-memory system like the T3E. also a high-end solution.
This system, the Xd1, is a low end system designed to be a half-step better than a cluster of off-the-shelf opterons. It's a multi-kernel cluster using MPI for all the data sharing. However the interconnect basically sits where the south-bridge sits on most opteron boxes.
So Cray still has the absolute cutting edge systems, but have now expanded down-market. (Rather, they acquired octiga-bay who did the early design work).
This is also not the first time this has happened. In the early 90s, Cray purchased a small start-up that was developing a NUMA-style mini-super based on sparc processors. They turned it into a product and sold a few, though not as many as they would have liked. During the SGI acquisition they sold the product to SUN, who branded it the E10000, and made about a billion dollars off of it. It's now the foundation for all of Sun's high-end Unix servers.
Cray also bought a small company (I forget the name) that made a cmos implementation of the YMP. This became the ymp-el, the J90, which pioneered technology for the SV1.
Cray has often built mid-range systems. Nothing new.
Dunno, but I bet you got a warm tootsie because the seat held part of the cooling system and power supply.
AT&ROFLMAO
The only Cray-I I've ever seen up close is the one at Deutsches Museum in Munich. It's actually quite comfortable to sit on, and the insides (at least right behind the panels, some of which have been replaced with clear plastic sheets) seem to contain nothing mecchanical (here's a photo of the museum's Cray). Might get a bit warm if you sit on tere while it's powered on, though :p
frotz grue
It's still on-going. Red Storm is the focus of cray's effort over the next couple of years. Red Storm is the real-deal MPP-style system with a micro-kernel OS. xd1 is a low-end mini-super they acquired to expand down-market. (like mercedes buying chrystler)
2 complimentary product lines. You could run the same application on both, though red storm provides real shared memory, which might allow better optimizations.