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

[fgodfrey]

Tera bought far more than a name when they bought us. They also bought a bunch of software and hardware people, many of whom (myself not included) have been with Cray Research (the original Cray) for many years. So, while it's certainly not the Cray of the mid-1980's, the tradition still goes back there, especially with the vector machines like the Cray X1/X1E and its impending follow-on.

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

[flaming-opus]

Which is true only insomuch as the old-time reputation could not possibly exist today. That was the cold war, this is the post-coldwar era. The old cray was a mammoth beast with its own share of myopia, but a lot of technical tallent. This allowed a few really brilliant concepts, and a lot of clever implementation to power two decades of brilliant computers. That said, they were brilliant solutions for the era. Old-school cray systems were built in an era when doing fundamental pieces of math was still pretty difficult, and the government was willing to pay ten million dollars for a machine that was proficient at doing math, and many tens of millions for a machine that was really good at it.

The difficult problems in building computers has changed, and the financial climate around supercomputers has changed quite a lot. Among other things, CMOS finally became fast enough to put bipolar in its grave, single microprocessor workstations became powerful enough to do all but the hardest of scientific tasks, and the average price of high performance (not top 10 on the list, but still fast) computers has plummeted. To ask the new cray to be like the old cray would be foolish.

That said, New Cray is still offers impressive products. All of Cray's 3 product lines have much lower entry-prices than similar crays of the 90's. They all have more managable power/cooling/physical size characteristics. They make much greater use of industry standard Disks and networks, and also can be administered and programmed much more like any other unix computer. You program a New Cray more or less the same as other contemporary HPC systems.

When cdc introduced the 6600, the president of IBM complained to his staff aking (paraphrase) 'how has cdc managed to best IBM's fastest computer with a staff of just 14 engineers and 4 programmers?' Seymor Cray responded "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question." Because new Cray is tiny does not mean that it is not capable of making impressive innovations. Old Cray's Gorilla days were very wasteful, and not necessarily full of the best moments of innovation.

Now, if only they could put four X1e CPUs into an air-cooled, rack-mount server and charge a reasonable amount for it. I'd much rather have a handful of vector processors than a few dozen opterons, anyday.

Re:excellent

[flaming-opus]

Close.
Craylink was designed at SGI, and renamed to craylink after they bought Cray. They introduced craylink in the origin2000, which they started selling half a year after buying cray, so I'm sure they couldn't have integrated any cray-designs into their product in that span.

After they sold Cray to Tera, SGI started calling the technology Numalink, and currently use it in their origin3, altix3, and altix4 product lines. They are on the 4th generation of the technology, which is 3.2GB/s per direction. The cray that was sold to Tera included the half-finished X1 system, which also uses numalink. It uses the older 1.6GBps/dir links, but uses 32 networks in parallel for a total of ~50GB/s/dir per node.

The Cray XT3 uses a newer network interconnect called seastar, which offers 3.8GBps/direction. This is probably what will be used in the X1's successor.

The Cray XD1, which your colleague bought, is a product cray acquired when they bought OctigaBay. They use an interconnect called the RappidArray switch, which provides 4GBps/direction of interconnect.

All of these interconnects are high-bandwidth and low latency. The XD1, is also very inexpensive for a cray, which is always nice.

Re:excellent

[flaming-opus]

No they won't! They have no reason to. The vector units that a cray uses aren't like altivec, sse, or other "bolt-on" vector units. The vector unit on a cray (or NEC) is a latency hiding mechanism. It's a method for forcing the programmer/compiler to structure the code such that the data loaded from memory is used a significant period of time after the load is initiated. This works pretty well on the HPC code that is used on crays, but not at all for the everyday server/workstation code that opterons run. Furthermore, to support that sort of vector unit, you need to have about eight times as much memory bandwidth as an opteron, which means many more pins on the socket, which are very expensive.

I think you're much more likely to see the cray vector processor retooled with lots of hypertransport connections, so it can use an opteron as its scalar unit, and use the same seastar routers that the xt3 uses. On the X1, the scalar unit already runs ahead of the vector unit, so I bet it's not all that important for the scalar unit to be on-die.

It only makes sense

[heatdeath]

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.

Re:It only makes sense

[fgodfrey]

I've never completely understood this argument (yes, I admit, I'm heavily biased). If I want to build a skyscraper, I'm not going to use the "mass market" crane that puts up the roof of a residential house. I'm going to use a specialized crane that's meant for building skyscrapers.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for commodity hardware in supercomputing, but to say that there's no room for custom hardware either misses the point. The only thing "off the shelf" about an AMD based Cray is the AMD. The logic board, and, most importantly, the network that interconnects the processors is entirely custom. Not to mention the fact that Cray will still build some entirely custom processors...

By the way - this is hardly the first Cray based on a commodity processor. The T3E and T3D were both Alpha processors, yet nobody calls those machines "commodity".

Sign You Invested In The Wrong Supercomputer, #342

[John_Booty]

#34. Your "supercomputing" vendor has an AOL email address.

From the press release...

Contact:
AMD
Teresa Osborne, 512-602-0040
teresa.osborne@amd.com
www.amd.com
or
Cray Inc.
Steve Conway, 651-592-7441
sttico@aol.com
www.cray.com

Sooooo... if I scrape together a few million bucks and buy a computer from these guys, will I still be able to contact my Cray rep once his 500 FREE TRY AOL NOW HOURS have expired?

Re:Put on your tinfoil hats...

[B3ryllium]

DARPA created the Internet.

You are using the Internet.

You are part of the conspiracy.

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.

nVidia motherboards

[CCFreak2K]

Hey, maybe the motherboards are nForces too. I bet all the new Crays will have digital 5.1 sound, an important feature for today's supercomputers.

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.

Finally....

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

A Computer capable of running Duke Nukem Forever....oh wait...

Re:...and now some real numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, seems Intel is still 6x AMD market share.

Wow, seems AMD *doubled* it's share of spots in the Top 500 list in *six months*. I bet Intel is ticked, and worried...this is very good PR for AMD.

Go AMD! Milk that NexGen core for all its worth, too bad you didn't invent it, you just bought it.

LOL! Intel fanboys don't have anything real to say these days, they have to resort to cheap ad-hominems. Don't worry, I'm sure someday Intel will come out with competitive chips again. Pretty sure, anyhow.

And as to AMD "just buying it", how would that relate to Intel getting so much Alpha technology and talent from it's deals with HP/Compaq/DEC?

It would be nice if you would start innovating one of these days.

Yeah, if AMD can produce better processors than Intel without innovating, just imagine what'll happen when it does innovate...! =)

Behold!

[katana]

I give you...the Crapteron!

Re:Had to be done

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

In Korea old jokes aren't funny anymore.

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-

Makes me wonder ...

[cpu_fusion]

The continued big-name backing of AMD (e.g. Sun, Cray) makes me wonder how sweet a deal Apple must have gotten to go with Intel over AMD. :)

AMD makes more than chips!

[scoobrs]

The parent poster needs to be reminded that a large chip manufacturer like Intel, IBM, and AMD makes much more than CPUs! They play a fundamental role in the design and system architecture of the machines built out of their chips. Interfaces like Hypertransport, PCI Express, and DDR are the work of these chip giants. To claim that changing the fundamental design of the CPUs has anything to do with the interaction of a supercomputer company and AMD is naive. Far more likely are changes in Hypertransport, interfaces to memory, or other bus-level projects that are more useful to a supercomputer vendor looking for the best possible overall system bandwidth anyway.