Cray has unveiled new upgrades to its XT supercomputer series. The high-end Cray XT6 supercomputer system and its XT6m midrange counterpart will combine the company’s scalability and architecture with AMD’s new offerings in processing for high performance computing (HPC).
The company said that the new Cray XT6 system, designed to support the HPC workloads, combines scalability with manageability, and application support to produce the general-purpose supercomputer. The XT6 supercomputer is upgradeable with future planned enhancements to hardware and software, and current XT5 supercomputer customers can upgrade to the XT6 system.
According to Cray, the XT6m supercomputer embodies the same design philosophy, and is based on the same architecture and software used in Cray’s largest supercomputing systems, but with an optimised network for system sizes ranging from 700 to 13,000 cores. Both the XT6 and XT6m systems feature an enhanced flat-top design that improves the company’s ECOphlex liquid cooling technology.
The compute blades in both systems feature four compute nodes that can be configured with up to 96 processor cores per blade or more than 2,300 processor cores per cabinet. Each compute node is composed of two AMD Opteron 6100 series processors, each coupled with its own memory and Cray SeaStar2+ interconnect. The compute nodes in both systems can also be configured with 32GB or 64GB DDR3 memory, the company said.
Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, said: The Cray XT5 system was the world’s first supercomputer to achieve sustained petascale performance on customer applications and has played a major role in a number of important scientific breakthroughs around the world.
“The new Cray XT6 product will continue to efficiently scale performance to the highest levels for our customers. Its new midrange counterpart, the Cray XT6m, is our second generation of supercomputer designed to effectively scale down our successful high-end solutions and provide the same benefits to a much broader set of scientists and engineers.
The Cray XT6 and Cray XT6m are expected to be available in the second quarter of 2010.
