The agreement gives Cray the ability to rebrand, directly market and sell Sun’s new Sun Fire[tm] servers as data management (input/output) nodes within Cray’s next-generation Cray MTA-2[tm] and Cray SV2[tm] supercomputer products.
Sun Microsystems’ new Sun Fire 6800 server, one of a full line of recently introduced servers, will be fully integrated into the Cray supercomputers and is designed to manage massive data traffic in and out of the systems. The Sun Fire 6800 server is also designed to manage extensive disk farms, ranging from hundreds of gigabytes (GBs) to petabytes.
The Cray MTA-2 multithreaded supercomputer, due out later this year, employs a revolutionary hardware design with large scalable shared memory, extremely fast I/O and unprecedented programming ease. It is designed to support up to 128 RISC-like hardware streams per processor. The Cray SV2 system, scheduled for availability in the second half of 2002, will offer extreme performance from tens of gigaflops (billions of calculations per second) to multiple tens of teraflops (trillions of calculations per second), and is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer product.
The Sun Fire servers aim to greatly enhance system productivity by providing the data management functions within the system. The Sun Fire platform currently holds up to 24 CPUs, 192 GB memory, 4 Dynamic System Domains, 9.6 GB/s sustained I/O bandwidth, and is fully hardware redundant. The foundation of the new Sun Fire systems is breakthrough technology, including the Sun[tm] Fireplane interconnect, and a next-generation, balanced system that is designed to deliver mainframe-class functionality at midrange price points.
This agreement will allow Cray to exploit the best data management technology on the market and reduce development costs for two next-generation products, said Cray Inc. Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. Cray will sell and support products designed to give customers unbeatable performance and attractive price/performance.
