HPCwire: Cray Unveils Personal Supercomputer

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September 16, 2008

Cray Unveils Personal Supercomputer

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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With few exceptions in its 30-year history, Cray has focused exclusively on the high end of the HPC market. This week the company announced a product aimed at a new space: deskside HPC. Ian Miller, Cray's senior vice president of sales and marketing, talked with HPCwire about the company's new CX1 personal supercomputer.

HPCwire: You've just announced a new personal supercomputing product called the Cray CX1. What is it?

Miller: The CX1 is Cray's new personal supercomputer. The unit is small -- it's meant to fit beside a desk -- and it can be plugged into a wall socket on standard office power. Users can configure it in a variety of ways to suit their specific needs, but fully outfitted for computation, it will hold up to eight nodes, each with two dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors, and up to 64 GB of memory per node. The machine is very versatile, with configuration options that allow users to mix and match storage, compute and visualization capability in the same box. The system can be configured with up to 4 TB of storage, and comes with Gigabit Ethernet or InfiniBand networking.

Customers will be able to pick the operating system that best matches their applications and their expertise. The CX1 comes with either RedHat Linux or, for the first time ever on a Cray product, Windows HPC Server 2008.

HPCwire: This is quite a departure for Cray. Who is this computer for?

Miller: We're launching the CX1 with the tag line "we take supercomputing personally," and that really reflects the whole philosophy we've adopted while developing this machine. The CX1 provides supercomputing where you need it. It's designed to run on standard 110 volt office power, and doesn't require additional cooling. It can sit under your desk, right where you work.

It's built for individual team and workgroup deployment, providing up to 64 cores (in a single chassis) of processing power that will enable users to run small and medium-sized jobs without the need to sit in batch queues and compete with other users for resources. And it can be configured to provide the particular mix of capabilities users need. While the CX1 holds up to eight compute nodes, customers can buy just the right number at first and then expand as their needs grow, and they can supplement compute nodes with storage and visualization nodes to make sure they have the right balance of capabilities that fit their needs.

The CX1 will fit well in workgroups and departments that need their own parallel processing capabilities, in business that need high performance computing for engineering or business intelligence, or even for developers in traditional high end supercomputing facilities who need a responsive, affordable environment for developing and debugging HPC software.

HPCwire: Why does this product make sense at this particular time? What hole in the market is it filling?

Miller: The CX1 is about helping customers overcome the obstacles to HPC adoption. Although there have been many recent accounts of the barriers to entry for customers new to HPC, the "Reveal" and "Reflect" reports from the US Council on Competitiveness are great recent examples. These reports identify three significant barriers: lack of application software, lack of sufficient talent, and cost constraints. We feel that we've gone a long way toward addressing all three of these with the CX1.

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Discussion

There are 1 discussion items posted.

VXTech Personal Cluster
Submitted by stephen south on 09/18/2008 - 7:07AM

Looks like Cray is OEM'ing a VXTech personal cluster - nothing wrong with that but hardly new technology - guess it's cheap way for people to get a Cray badge

Post #1

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