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."

Comments

long time no news...

[mirko]

Since they had been bought by SGI, I've actually been wondering whether they would make me dream again.

Re:long time no news...

[robslimo]

I think this is evidence that they are headed in the right direction. Rather than completely custom hardware all the way down to the processors, they've positioned themselves more competitively by using the CPU design power of a major business and consumer supplier as well as applying their own special design talents to other hardware areas that are not served by the business/consumer vendors.

I too was worried that Cray would completely disappear if they continued to pursue the expensive and anachronistic supercomputer design model.

Where's the source code

[Donny Smith]

> Cray HPC-enhanced Linux, Kernel version 2.4.21

I wonder what that means - Red Hat EL 3.0 with enhancements, or their own thing..

Interconnect - I wonder how their proprietary interconnect compares to IB..

File system - ext3? No cluster file system?

Re:Cray doesn't do Clusters?

[tallganglyguy]

This is more than your typical cluster with a fast interconnect bolted on. I would rather picture it as something completely different with a glorified cluster bolted on. The true beauty of the system lies not only in the fast interconnect, but also in the 6 FPGAs that are onboard each chassis. The power of a properly implemented algorithm in hardware is a force to be dealt with. This setup by and far is not your typical cluster.

It's nice to see Cray out there

[Proteus]

Cray systems may not always be the fastest thing around, but they are solid. It would be nice to see more producers paying careful attention to clean design and reliability over having the latest speed-booster.

It's nice to see our old friend Cray continue to keep a foot in the market -- if nothing else, it makes everyone else stay on their toes.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Doc Ruby]

Not when you want to run existing Linux apps on those gates, without rewriting them (which would be a waste of programmer time, much more valuable). And running Linux apps on those gates is a first step in porting them to native FPGA netlists. This is the way to leverage existing apps to increase the utility of FPGAs, by running useful apps on them, and optimizing to native parallel execution. That way we don't waste either gates OR programmer time, not to mention every other resource in the chain.

Re:Not the top end

[visgoth]

I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge. If engineers could somehow magically fit the total power of the Earth Simulator into a single 1u chassis, people would still cluster a few hundred of them together. There's no such thing as enough processing power, as people always find a way to utilize it.

(commence snide comments about the next windows release... now :) )

The end of custom CPUs

[heroine]

Sort of sad they abandonned their custum CPUs for these commodity CPUs. Their liquid cooling was pretty nihilistic. You'd think there would be a lot to be gained from the old techniques of restricting everything to 64 bit operations, liquid evaporation cooling, and quad core parts.