Cray Supercomputers to be Based on AMD Opterons

PsychicX writes "AMD and Cray have announced an agreement to base Cray supercomputers on AMD's Opteron line until the end of the decade, and to collaborate on Cray's 2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government's DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program. Cray already offers the XT3 and XD1 supercomputers based on Opteron."

Comments

excellent

[harryoyster]

That is excellent news for AMD even though there wont be massive volumes compared to home markets it will still be some heavy industry weight backing the AMD opteron processor. Hopefully AMD will adopt some additional features that could make the Opteron even better suited to the super computer market.

Re:excellent

[14erCleaner]

Except that this "industry heavyweight" is actually Tera, the little company that bought out the Cray name as the supercomputer industry was dying. Only the name Cray remains, not the old-time reputation.

Re:excellent

[Aardpig]

Only the name Cray remains, not the old-time reputation.

That's not quite true; they still sell Cray-specific technology. One of my colleagues has just bought a small 24-core Opteron system. Each node contains two dual-core processors, and the 6 nodes are linked together by 80 Gb/s Craylink cables. I think this interlink technology is also licensed to SGI for use in their Origin computers.

Re:excellent

[evilviper]

The firm already has manufacturing bottlenecks; its production fabs are cramped as is. There are also problems with inventory.

What bullshit. Provide some sources for this info, or shut up. AMD is opening a new fab, and has a contract with a 3rd party to produce cores if AMD can't keep up... They're doing fine producing Opeterons.

Incidentally, I can provide real, actual sources that show Intel is the one who is having problems producing enough chips to meet demand.

Re:excellent

[Frumious Wombat]

So, just curious, but why don't you put your efforts into crunching your traditional vector processors onto some more affordable piece of silicon, rather than trying to recreate the T3E out of Opterons?

I know chemists who claim there there are still algorithms than don't run as well on modern MPars as they did on mid-90s vector Crays. I know we're not a huge market, but I bet there are some other fields that would rather have a deskside T90, rather than a multi-proc Opteron box.

Hmmm

[Aundy]

I wonder what the governmnet will do with these cheaper, powerful supercomputers?

Re:...and now some real numbers

[Vengeance]

Hrmmm. In six months AMD went from 25 systems on the list to 55 systems on the list, and you think Intel is doing well?

Let's extrapolate for a moment, shall we? I'll even do Intel a favor and clamp down on the AMD increases each time. Basically, AMD more than doubled their share of this elite group in six months' time.

Six months from now, they've almost doubled to 100 systems.

Twelve months from now, slowing down and growing only 75%, they've got 175 systems.

Two years in the future, with even more slowing down of their growth, 300 systems on the list are AMD. I wonder whether the preponderance of that growth comes from the current 400-odd Intel machines or from the 73 IBM setups...

Likely? Maybe not. Possible? Yeah, it just might be.

Re:...and now some real numbers

[hattig]

On November 2004 the list had 84 computers with Itanium 2 processors. In June 2005, the number shrunk to 79.

Now only 46 computers contain Itanium 2 chips according to the latest list, released Monday.

That's quite a collapse. Intel is propping up their high-end systems with volcano-simulator Xeons?

Meanwhile, the number of supercomputers using Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chips has increased. A total of 55 Opteron-based computers made the list, up from 25 in June. (Opterons were found in just 29 computers on the November 2004 list.)

A near doubling in a year. And that's with AMD's first real server standard processor. HORUS comes out today, that'll put AMD into the 32 and 64 core marketplace. Not bad for a company with 0 server marketshare, nevermind Top500 systems two years ago.

As for the rest of your troll, I think most of the people here are clever enough to see it for what it is.

The irony of it all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Crays supercomputers were known for their high performance vector operations. These operation have very little to do with PC world except its close cousin - SIMD operations (gaming, graphics). Now the fact that AMD tops cray (at least on commercial merits) is like having an AMD instruction set adopted by Intel (oh, wait).
More ironic is the fact that the compiler that will be used for those supercomputers is probably the PathScale variant of Open64 - SGI's compiler that was released as open source after it was retargetted to the Itanic architecture.
I might have some misconceptions, careful readers, please fill-in the blanks.

Re:The irony of it all.

[convolvatron]

disclaimer: i worked at cray on the xt3

its not ironic at all. its a question of resources and volume.
cray has a few very bright people (still, sort of). they are
essentially a us government lab. they do a bad job, but its insane
to think that 100 people can build and maintain several different
supercomputer architectures.

a $300 opteron is almost always more effective than a $60000 X1
processor. they have alot of bright people too, and alot more of
them.

the only reason that cray still exists is support for parallelism
and the provision of high memory bandwidth systems. but even that
niche is being eroded pretty severely. the xt3 communications chip
runs at 3.5GB/s in each direction. it costs about $250 for cray to
have each of them made. for the same $250 i can buy a mellanox nic
that runs at half the speed

its no suprise that cray is using opterons. they actually got lucky
by committing to amd early and having it turn out so well.

the real question is whether there is any more room for a cray at
all. the commodity world moves so quickly. the xd machines (which
they purchased) are really their best asset, but it still hard to
justify that kind of margin for what is essentially a well
constructed cluster.

my experience

[pigwiggle]

I've been running on an XT3 now off and on; when it's stable it's a workhorse. Anyway, I'm not up on all the given bench marks, etc. But, in my experience (molecular dynamics) with my homebrewed code, an opteron cluster absolutely wastes anything put together with intel or IBM.

The Chipset is the key.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Specialized computing hardware for supercomputers has always seemed like a fiscally bad choice. It'll be good to see what kinds of improvements we can see in research possibilities as supercomputing costs come down from using mass-marketed parts.

Cray likes to build classical vector-driven machines. In that space, you can't rely on some external kludge like Myrinet for your communications; instead, your value-add is in the chipsets that get all those CPUs talking to one another [and to the memory subsystem].

In one of Cray's previous incarnations, they once possessed a chipset/backplane tech for the Sparc processor that Sun purchased off of Silicon Graphics for a song and a dance, and immediately turned into the insanely profitable Sunfire series. The big question here is whether this new agreement requires Cray to share their chipset/backplane tech with AMD [in which case some of it might filter its way back down to the level where mere plebians like us would be able to afford it].

Compilers !! ???

[Anonymous Coward]

But what compilers are people using with the Opteron to get its best speed ? We have been looking for good compilers (Fortran, C, C++) for numbercrunching on AMD-64 and have been dissappointed so far. Our preferred compilers are Intel, but they have been modified to crap out on AMD chips.

Re:Opteron is not NexGen's tech

[sgt scrub]

Actually the K7 was designed with most of the DEC technology. I'm not knocking AMD though. I've used them since the 386 days. I think they have surpassed the Alpha --me ducks-- in speed and efficiency, though I still wouldn't give up my 433a withought a fist fight.

Their bus arch and chipset tech is the most interesting. (if someone has proof that AMD didn't design this it better be solid). This attention from Cray, and the super computer people in general, is due more to this success. AMD has the best design and it shows. It is one thing to buy schetches of a something and another to make it fly this good.

More to the point regarding Cray is their XD1. THAT is a cool machine! I was looking around at different FPGA stuff and almost shorted my keyboard with drool. Damn, I wish I was rich. -sniffle-

Re:why not use the ultrasparc T1?

[NerveGas]

They have 8 cores!

So? How much memory bandwidth do they have? Not I/O bandwidth, but memory bandwidth. I highly doubt that they have as much bandwidth PER CORE as the Opterons do, and in big applications, memory bandwidth can be a very important factor.

You cant build an enterprise machine without Ultrasparc (or Power4 or PA_RISC) CPUs.

    I guess that Cray thinks differently.