Cray Searches 'Scholars' for XT4 and XMT
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Nov 14, 2006

The supercomputer company, Cray will release new AMD Opteron based XT4 and a multi threaded XMT computer.

Saurabh Sonawala, MD, Hinditron Infosystems - Cray's representative in India, has informed that the releases would be available in January 2007. "They will be simultaneously released in the US and India, however their procurement could take some time. The releases are priced between one million dollar and more depending upon the CPU installations. The price could range as high as hundreds of dollars."

The company has already started marketing it to current customers. These include the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) at Noida, Institute for Plasma Research, Ahmedabad, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Mumbai, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata and Institute for Mathematical Science in Chennai. Besides, the company will also tap other clients for the new releases.

XT4 is based on the earlier XT3 system, which clusters many low-end systems using a high-speed network. It uses Cray's new SeaStar2 to manage data faster. It can also use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) made by DRC Computing that can be reconfigured to run specified calculations even faster, added Sonawala.

The new system is designed for superior scalability, incorporating the latest generation of AMD Opteron processors matched with expanded local and interconnect bandwidth that provides industry-leading system balance necessary to optimize application performance at scale. The system is equipped with AMD Opteron dual-core processors that can be easily upgraded to AMD's quad-core processing technology in the future to deliver balanced petaflops performance.

The Cray XMT platform, a massively multithreaded supercomputing technology has been developed for large-scale, state-of-art data analysis work. Previously code-named 'Eldorado' and developed under a government partnership, the system is the first supercomputer to offer over one million concurrent processing threads in a single system.

Through partnerships with third-party solution providers, Cray will make this platform available for performing advanced data analysis, data mining and predictive analytics in markets such as financial services, business intelligence, bio informatics, digital media and energy.

The Cray XMT system joins the Cray XT4 supercomputer as the next innovative technology under Cray's Rainier program, the initial phase of the company's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The Rainier program aims to bring all Cray processing technologies onto a common Cray XT infrastructure, allowing diverse and challenging applications to run on a single, highly scalable foundation without compromising performance or usability.

With custom massively multithreaded processor chips designed for compatibility under the AMD Torrenza initiative, the Cray XMT system leverages technology from the Cray XT3 and Cray XT4 systems to produce a new cost-effective, massively multithreaded supercomputer.

"The Cray XMT platform implements an important new approach to overcome memory latency, offering the potential to substantially and cost-effectively accelerate data-intensive applications in a variety of sectors," said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development, Cray. "In partnership with government agencies and companies who develop integrated solutions, we expect this platform to provide levels of performance for data analysis that have never been achieved before."

For large data-driven problems that today exist in unrelated and diverse data sets, massively multithreaded processing offers the potential for breakthrough performance increase. Each processor in the multithreaded Cray XMT system can handle up to 128 concurrent threads. The system is designed to scale up to more than 8,000 processors, yielding more than one million concurrent threads that can operate on as much as 128 terabytes (128 trillion bytes) of shared physical memory.