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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."
SGI does not own CRAY. They did buy them back in 1996. SGI sold its Cray unit in 2000 to Tera Computer.
well I think since the advent of home computer beowulf clusters it has take the awe out of huge supercomputers. Before it wasn't technically possible to scale a system to such high performance, but now with a bit of cash you can go buy OTS G%s and make a top500 computer. It is taking a bit more to inspire dreams with simply performance specs.
I've heard conflicting reports on this - reading Cray's own literature, you see them say:
"Tightly coupled to the AMD Opterons and switching fabric, [the RapidArray Communications Processors] handle memory to memory copies, global memory management, and system wide process synchronization, freeing..."
(Emphasis mine)
Does this mean the HT links give the OS the view of a single-system for each chassis? (Or rack, even?) Ie, can I utilize a single processor out of those 12 in a chassis, and access 96GB of RAM with that one process WITHOUT using MPI or rDMA?
It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.
Still, if they need someone to, uh, test one...
Interesting numbers. Also to note, NEC's Earth Simulator is now nearly three years old - the Cray XD1 is made with modern AMDs.
I guess there's no getting around it. For the time being our really fast computers will just be fucking huge. Oh, and call NEC if you want a big computer. (:
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I thought Cray was trying to convince the world that Clusters were not as good as true supercomputers, but this looks like a glorified cluster. In looking under the hood it appears to be just a collection of 2-way SMP Opterons with a superfast proprietary network backbone.
And it's running Linux, if that matters to you
I guess there's no getting around it. For the time being our really fast computers will just be fucking huge. Oh, and call NEC if you want a big computer. (:
;)
Actually:
Blue Gene
Let's see what happens come Supercomputing '04... good things can come in small sizes.
For my apps, I do iterative matrix calculations. However, one of the required data tables scales as n^2.3 (ish) of the system size. These can be precalculated, or calculated on demand. Typical size for a small run is 4-6 GB. I've filled a 40 GB array with data tables before.
Thus, the part that impacts runtimes the most is either the on disc lookup, which is still faster than direct calculation, which we've also had to do.
I looked into FPGA's a while back. Some back of envelope calculations show that a single FPGA should be able to calculated the data table on demand, and it'll be faster than reading from disc.
(Turns out, that to actually get a usable solution for a basic PC would need to hack up the whole tool chain. FPGA cards for a PC are all designed for DSP, rather than numerics).
So, with an FPGA and a CPU, I could elminated the slowest part of the job, and scale up to, what, a 1GB working matrix, which is about 8 time larger than the biggest job I've ever run, which hogged a T3E1200 for 6 hours.
So, in short, gimme an FPGA and some reasonable tool chain, and I will be able to about half runtimes, and, more importantly, scale up to 10 times larger calculations. 5 time larger calculations is the most I've ever been asked about.
Time to brush up on my VHDL, I think.
Earth Simulator uses vector processors. If you want a comparable Cray system, you should be looking at the X1 which is also a vector processor. Incidentally, the X1's silicon runs so hot they use evaporative florinert cooling instead of a straight liquid - the florinert is heated to just under the evaporation point and sprayed onto the processor so that the phase change will remove more heat than just immersion.
Why?
Tera's MTA isn't exactly like HyperThreading. HyperThreading looks at (currently two) threads and sees which instructions from each stream it can schedule each clock. MTA was more like round-robin scheduling of threads on a per-clock basis. At each clock N, it scheduled an instruction from thread N, on clock N+1, it scheduled an instruction from thread N+1. In other words, if your process had only one thread, and the MTA processor ran at 1GHz and had 128 "threads", then your process ran as if it were on a single threaded 8MHz CPU.
12 Opterons deliver 58* GFlops (where * = peak). The Army's recent G5 cluster (1566*2 G5 processors running at 2GHz) deliver 25* TFlops. 58 divided by 12 yields 4.8* GFlops per chip for an Opteron, and 25000 divided by 3132 yields 8* GFlops per chip for the G5. What's wrong with this math? I didn't think the G5 had numbers THAT much better than an Opteron. And with G5s hitting 2.5GHz today the numbers would be much worse (or better, depending on your point of view).
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Cray not-too-long-ago had major announcements with the RedStorm project. I believe that system is supposed to be a single image 10,000 CPU AMD based rig. There are some oddities friends have pointed out, like the OS is based on IRIX I believe...
Yea check this out:
Cray Unicos/mp"
Actually that references the X1, which is not based on PeeCee stuff, but actually a 8 core MPM.
Sad thing is, even with Red Storm I think IBM will remain on top as their contract calls for 130,000 of their powerPCs on one system?
It would be nice to see Cray on top, with something other than a commoditiy processors. I realize the T3D and T3E were both Alpha based systems.
PS, I still have a J932se 32 proc Vector Cray ( for sale ) if anyone wants a Cray for home. $4500, real deal 3 cabinet Cray from 97', most likely used for gov't nuclear energy something-or-other. Located in Southeastern Virginia.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Actually, in the year between crash of Cray Computer (in March 1995) and his death in an auto accident, Seymour Cray started a new company, SRC Computers, which still exists, and makes a parallel Pentium-based computer (which also incorporates custom hardware processing elements). I believe that this product is the same thing he was working on from the start of that company in 1996.
Have you read my blog lately?
The Cray-1 and X-MP machines had soft padded versions and the Y-MP had hard plastic versions. Most of the really loud stuff was in the motor generator room off to the side. The ambient noise in the typical larger computer room was louder than anything coming from the Cray. The soft padded versions weren't the most comfortable things to sleep on, but they did in a pinch very late at night.
After searching everywhere for the legendary "Wang Computer" tshirt, I decided to fall abck on teh second geekiest computer company to get a shirt from, Cray. I couldn't find a shirt through the normal outlets (eBay/ThinkGeek), so I called them directly. The woman that answered was glad to help and shipped out, not a tshirt, but a very nice collared shirt that makes it look like I work for Cray! I wer it to all the conventions and I become cool(er).
*queue calls to Cray*
Their story as far as storage is kinda lame; I think they're praying Lustre won't suck.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
ISR (Isothermal Systems Research, Inc.) and cray have cross licensed patents on this technology. I don't know if ISR plans on productizing this or not.
I imagine that this is extremely expensive stuff to do. Since a cray can charge $40,000 per processor for the X1, they can get away with a $700 cooler. Not so easy on a PC.
You shouldn't need phase-change to cool a PC.
Just circulate the stuff and run it through a radiator.
BTW, HP was recently researching cooling chips with inkjet nozzles spraying a coolant which evaporates easily onto the CPU.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
You think its a joke, but I used to work there and they do refer to employees of the company as Crayons.