Cray welds together 10,000 dual-core Opertons

THE DUAL CORE LAUNCH AMD threw last week was all about business and high end solutions with the consumer side downplayed quite a bit. The highest end products they showed were from Cray, the XD1 and the XT3, going from a low end of 12 CPUs on the XD1 to a mere 10,000 on the XT3. With dual cores, that number doubles.

The XD1 is the former Octigabay server, and it is now semi-artificially limited to 1 cabinet, or 144 CPUs. It is considered an 'entry level' supercomputer if such a thing exists. What first drew my attention to it is that I had no clue as to what I was looking at. There was a big open box and connectors that I had never seen before.

After staring at it, I was pretty clear that the two boards on the left are each motherboards with two CPUs. Each pair has two distinct variations of mobos, and they are not simple mirror images, but close. The connectors on the other hand were a puzzle until I figured out the cards. Each connector is more or less a slot for a node. If the connectors are not proprietary, I have never seen anything close in common usage. You will note they are not exactly mirrored.

When the XD1 runs out of headroom, you can go to the XT3, a machine that scales a lot higher, but looks a lot more conventional. There are 4 CPUs in each cabinet, one is naked here, and a bunch of DIMMs and VRMs. Pretty conventional at first glance.

The rear is a little more odd. It has a large heatsink across the back, or maybe it is a connector. Either way, there is this large aluminum block with holes in it, and on the far right, a power connector. It looks pretty cool either way.

This was my first closeup with Cray products in the last few years, and they are fairly impressive. Almost nothing is standard, and that has both good and bad connotations. Good because it probably is built for the task, bad because it is probably priced to match. For my uses, pictures and drooling, it sure was neat.µ