November 15, 2010
SEATTLE, and NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 15 -- At the 2010 Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, LA, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the latest addition to its line of Cray XE supercomputers with the launch of the Cray XE6m system. With the new Cray XE6m supercomputer, researchers, scientists and engineers with midrange high performance computing (HPC) computational needs can now purchase a cost-effective system that is scalable, reliable and built on Cray's proven petascale technologies.
Available now, the Cray XE6m supercomputer includes the same features found in the high-end Cray XE6 systems, such as Cray's Gemini interconnect, the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment and powerful AMD Opteron processors. The scaled-down configuration of the Cray XE6m is designed to maintain an attractive cost of ownership, and extend Cray's presence in market segments that have needs for midrange supercomputing systems, such as the university, manufacturing, weather and life sciences communities.
"The Cray XE6m supercomputer is an exciting system for us because we can now take all of the innovative features and technologies of our Gemini-based supercomputers and offer that same functionality to both new and existing customers at a lower entry point," said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division. "While some companies approach scalability from the bottom up, we strongly believe in scaling from the top down. Under this approach, Cray benefits from an expanded base of customers, but more importantly, the HPC user community benefits from cost-effective access to industry-leading supercomputing technology."
Fully upgradeable from current Cray XT5m and Cray XT6m systems, the Cray XE6m supercomputer is also designed to give customers the ability to upgrade to future Cray systems and technologies. In September 2010, Cray announced that the Company is developing blades based on the NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs for the Cray XE6 supercomputer. The Cray XE6m supercomputer will also be available with blades featuring the same NVIDIA GPUs when they become available. Additionally, features currently available in the Cray XE6 system, such as the Cluster Compatibility Mode built into Cray Linux Environment, can also be found in the Cray XE6m system allowing users to run applications from independent software vendors without modification.
Another innovative feature of the Cray XE6m system is the hardware and software support for modern parallel languages such as Unified Parallel C and Co-Array Fortran. The City University in New York (CUNY), purchased a Cray XE6m supercomputer to exploit the advantages provided by these Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming languages. CUNY's users are working on a project to jump-start academic research in the development of PGAS-based applications.
Paul Muzio, Director of the CUNY HPC Center, stated, "Our staff and researchers at CUNY have extensive experience in the development of applications using Co-Array Fortran and Unified Parallel C. We will be applying that expertise and using the Cray XE6m system to address problems in engineering, bio-medical science and data intensive computing that require low latency inter-processor communications to support fine grain parallelism. Our experience has shown that the PGAS one-sided programming model is often a more natural and efficient approach to application development than the traditional two-sided, library-supported parallel programming model."
Dr. Michael Kress, vice president, Technology Systems, College of Staten Island, CUNY, said, "CUNY is the largest urban university in the United States with a total enrollment of over 450,000 students and 10,000 faculty members. It is the country's most diverse university with over 125 different languages spoken and where 42 percent of the students are first generation college attendees. The addition of the Cray XE6m, with PGAS programming model support, also adds diversity to our HPC infrastructure, now the largest in academia in the City of New York."
The system will be designated "Salk" after Dr. Jonas Salk, an alumnus of CUNY's City College of New York. CUNY's acquisition of the Cray XE6m system was made possible by grant CNS-0958379 from the National Science Foundation.
The Cray XE6m, along with the Cray XT5m and Cray XT6m, is the Company's third generation of its midrange supercomputer designed to effectively scale down Cray's high-end systems while providing the same benefits to an expanded base of users. The compute blades feature four compute nodes designed for high scalability in a small footprint and can be configured with up to 96 dual-socket nodes per cabinet. Each compute node is composed of two AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors (the eight and 12-core "Maranello" platform), each coupled with its own memory and dedicated Cray Gemini interconnect. The compute nodes in the Cray XE6m systems can also be configured with 32 GB or 64 GB DDR3 memory.
The Cray XE6m supercomputer, with prices starting at under $500,000, features the option of using the Company's industry-leading ECOphlex liquid cooling technology, designed to reduce the customer's energy usage and lower the total cost of ownership.
About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology is designed to enable scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.
-----
Source: Cray Inc.
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.