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Cray Unveils XC30 Supercomputer
Nerval's Lobster writes "Cray has unveiled a XC30 supercomputer capable of high-performance computing workloads of more than 100 petaflops. Originally code-named 'Cascade,' the system relies on Intel Xeon processors and Aries interconnect chipset technology, paired with Cray's integrated software environment. Cray touts the XC30's ability to utilize a wide variety of processor types; future versions of the platform will apparently feature Intel Xeon Phi and Nvidia Tesla GPUs based on the Kepler GPU computing architecture. Cray leveraged its work with DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program in order to design and build the XC30. Cray's XC30 isn't the only supercomputer aiming for that 100-petaflop crown. China's Guangzhou Supercomputing Center recently announced the development of a Tianhe-2 supercomputer theoretically capable of 100 petaflops, but that system isn't due to launch until 2015. Cray also faces significant competition in the realm of super-computer makers: it only built 5.4 percent of the systems on the Top500 list, compared to IBM with 42.6 percent and Hewlett-Packard with 27.6 percent."
It's no Cray, unless it also doubles as stylish atrium furniture.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That's almost enough to run Vista
They've released the output of a raytracer, and little more by the looks of it.
Things that don't exist are not "capable" of anything. (Well, unless you're of a religious persuasion...)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Will it play Crysis? Will it blend?
http://www.craysupercomputers.com/images/Systems/CrayXMP/CrayXMP_Feathered.jpg
http://www.craysupercomputers.com/images/Systems/CrayYMP8/CrayYMP8_Feathered.jpg
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
While the article says they 'unveiled' it, it doesn't give any information about the hardware at all. I'm guessing it hasn't actually been built yet. Too bad. The Top 500 Supercomputers list is due to be updated this month.
That shit cray.
In November, 2001, the fastest supercomputer was 12 TFlops. You can achieve that today for less than $5,000 on your desktop by ganging together four GPGPU cards (such as the 3 TFlops Radeon 7970 for less than $500 each). Go back to 1999 and it's only 3 TFlops and to match today you wouldn't even need a special motherboard.
So just wait 11 years for the prices to come down.
"Originally named 'Cascade'" ... and now named for a midsize Volvo.
It might not be the fastest supercomputer in the world, but at least it'll be safe.
0 1 - just my two bits
What defines the upper bound for these systems? To some degree, isn't the limit mostly price and an algorithm that is parallel enough, in the sense you could keep adding nodes? Is there some limit to the number of nodes the interconnects and software can address, or do they assume some reasonable upper bound on price or size, or assume certain category of algorithms so they can estimate when communication between nodes becomes a bottleneck?
But does it run linux?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
And not first post!
Do these supercomputers run simultaneous jobs or is it one thing at a time? I'm wondering if process scheduling and context switching would cause the computer spin its wheels. Also, multiprocessing is probably not all that beneficial for the kinds of simulations run on the supercomputers.
Do they just keep running SPEC benchmarks on it until they get Nr.1?
Or do they have actual useful applications ready for this thing?
Just buy a rack of FPGAs and be done with it.
...until the Freeman saves us...
Super computers
Black mesa
Cascade
Resonance cascade
2012...
I'm just... Saiyan...
That it runs Windows 8 nearly-acceptably
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
For a company with a market cap of less than half a billion to have made 1 in 20 of the Top500 is an extraordinary achievement. IBM -> $215 billion, HPQ ->$27 billion
Eh, I don't get it. It's a cluster. So what? How is this more impressive than n clusters of 1/n capacity? It's not like you or I are going to get to schedule all cpus simultaneously. My guess is, nobody gets to.
The Top500 reports actual performance as measured with LINPACK, hardware vendors report the theoretical performance of their chips, which in the case of GPUs is often quite a bit more than you'd be able to squeeze out with LINPACK.
For comparison: Tsubame 2.0 consists of 1400 nodes with approx. 4200 NVIDIA Tesla C2075, which should yield -- according to your estimate -- 2.1 PFLOPS (4200 * 0.5 TFLOPS), yet it is listed at 1.2 PFLOPS. So just add two years to your estimate and you should be fine...
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Cray has only 5..6 % of the top 500 but 17% of the top 100 only bypassed by IBM.
And HP is only "hanging in there" quite far behind, not only do they have only 6% of the "top 100", there is nothing in there with a really recent innovative tech, and it's obvious that they are more or less leaving this market...
This interestingly leaves only IBM and Cray as "top very very high end vendors", with Hitachi, Fujitsu and Bull as distant third level vendors...
Why does Cray still stick to Xeons? This would have been a perfect application for Itanium III, and they would have hit their petaflop goals easier
66Tflops per cabinet is what the machine will ship with now. Cray has already announced that cascade will support both nvidia GPUs and Intel's knights Corner coprocessors, which should bump that up to 200-400 Tflops per cabinet, sometime next year. It would still take a lot of cabinets to hit 100 petaflops, but it begins to look plausible when you add accelerators.
let the sandy storm does his work on this machine, sandy storm is on the sandy bridge of the intel chips to set an digital storm on the bridge