C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pa la guerre
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Cray announces XK6 supercomputer
SUPERCOMPUTER COMPANY Cray has announced the latest addition to its high performance computing range, the Cray XK6, which uses AMD processors and Nvidia graphics cards.
The supercomputer has Cray's Gemini interconnect, along with AMD Opteron 6200 "Interlagos" processors and Nvidia's Tesla 20 series GPUs. The Opteron 6200 chips have 16 cores and there will be up to 96 of them per cabinet. There will also be up to 96 graphics cards per cabinet.
This will give the XK6 a potential compute power of over 50 petaflops, that is 50 quadrillion operations per second, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. This is vastly superior to the previous record holder, China's Tianhe-1A, which is capable of 2.5 petaflops at peak performance.
These speeds will be available at the top end implementation of Cray's design, with up to 500,000 scalar processors at work. Customers will be able to buy smaller rigs of one or more cabinets that are not capable of quite the same speeds, but they will still be very impressive.
The supercomputer will be a hybrid model with intra-node flexibility, capable of running scalar or accelerator component applications, thanks to the AMD and Nvidia hardware. They can also be teamed up with older Cray XE6 models to create a powerful system and can be scaled to meet the needs of each particular customer organisation.
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, based in Manno, Switzerland, will be the first to use one of the new Cray supercomputers, upgrading its old Cray XE6m system to a multi-cabinet XK6. The Swiss centre specialises in scientific research for meteorology, climatology, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, genetics, mathematics and a slew of other areas.
The centre said it won't be aiming for the Top 500 supercomputer list with a GPU stunt, so it's likely that the machine it sets up won't be capable of the full potential speed of the XK6 at its highest capacity.
Older Cray models, such as the XT4, XT5, XT6 and XE6 can be upgraded to the new model. The XK6 is expected to be available in the second half of 2011. µ
Tags: Hardware
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I understand that cost, interconnects, power consumption are important considerations in SC but I thought that Itaniums and IBM Power were engineered for big-tin and SC applications,
there has been SC based on Itanium in the past, i.e
"A Hewlett-Packard supercomputer at
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is fully operational, HP said Tuesday. The system is capable of performing 11.8 trillion calculations per second and is geared for chemistry, climatology and molecular science research.
The system uses 1,984 of Intel's 1.5GHz Itanium 2 "Madison" processors. An earlier version with 1.0GHz "McKinley" Itanium processors was ranked at No. 8 on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, and HP expects that ranking to climb now that the system has been completed.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/HP-Itanium-supercomputer-up-and-running/2110-1006_3-5068401.html#ixzz1NPrgDxFo
no reputable supercomputer company has manufactured anything with itaniums in them, they're fast and all and make for nice benchmarks and expo cubicles, but no big scale project has invested in itanium.
@kob opteron is the natural choice. look at any university/academic/government project involving more than 500 cpu's.... all opteron.
KOB
I thought Intel's quickpath was equivalent to AMD hyper-transport, including scaling beyond 10.
The current record holders, Tianhe-I has "4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 processors and 1,024 Intel Xeon E5450 processors"
-- I know AMD is considerably cheaper so maybe 2000 opterons may be cheaper or similar priced and higher performing than 1200 Xeon's
What about Itanium and POWER?
yeah, right. Let's see what happens when supercomputers based on Intel's latest big multicore CPUs start popping up.
The AMD's HyperTransport protocol, the inter-processor comm technology, is much more efficient and capable than anything Intel has to offer, so when you need 10's ormore of CPUs to talk among themselves, it is the natural choice.
Why was opteron chosen over Intel's Westmere-ex or Itanium ?