Cray XT-3 Ships

anzha writes "Cray's XT-3 has shipped. Using AMD's Opteron processor, it scales to a total of 30,580 CPUs. The starting price is $2 million for a 200 processor system. One of its strongest advantages over the std linux cluster is that it has an excellent interconnect built by Cray. Sandia National Labs and Oak Ridge National Labs are among the very first customers. Read more here."

Comments

Re:software

[Coryoth]

what kind of operation system runs on this beast?

UNICOS is usually a safe bet. In this case the specs say UNICOS/lc, which is made up of "SUSE(TM) Linux(TM), Cray Catamount Microkernel, CRMS and SMW software"

I'm not entirely clear how to interpet that, but I think it runs as follows: It runs the Catamount Microkernel as the kernel, and uses SUSE for everything else (so we have SUSE Linux, without the Linux - all of a sudden that GNU/Linux stuff starts to make sense). The CRMS is their interconnect management and monitoring software, and SMW is the System Management Workstation - which I'm guessing is their administration frontend.

It's worth noting that that's some pretty serious software there (because Cray has a lot of experience dealing with large systems) - you can bet that the management and monitoring software is some very serious stuff.

This thing is to a beowulf cluster what a dual G5 PowerMac is to homebuilt PC system running Linux From Scratch. It's going to work flawlessly "out of the box" with a smooth and polished interface that lets you get done everything you want to do simply and easily. You can of course make your home built PC with LFS work just as well, it's just going to take you an awful lot of effort.

Jedidiah.

Re:You don't have to begin to imagine

[wronskyMan]

Disclaimer: IANACEBIATAPEC (I Am Not A Cray Engineer But I Am Taking A Power Engineering Course)
It's fairly common to get a KVA !=KW.
Overall power used by a load is expressed as S=P+jQ, where P is the "real" power and Q is the reactive power (capacitive/inductive from motors, fluorescent lamp ballasts, etc).

While the "units" of S, P, and Q are power=voltage*current, S is generally expressed in VA, P in W, and Q in VAR(volt-ampere reactive) to differentiate the variables. Because the magnitude of S=sqrt(P^2+Q^2), S will always be greater than or equal to P (in this case, 14.8kVA=sqrt((14.5kW)^2+(+-2.965kVAR)^2)