Cray Announces General Availability of the Cray XD1 Opteron/Linux-based Supercomputer.SEATTLE -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced the general availability of the new Cray XD1(TM) supercomputer, an Opteron/Linux-based system priced from under $100,000 to about $2 million (U.S. list) that handily outperforms similarly priced Linux clusters. The company also announced the United States Department of Agriculture United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), n.pr established in 1862, USDA is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products. It conducts ongoing research in areas from human nutrition to new crop technologies and also helps ensure open Forest Service is a Cray XD1 customer, which adds to an impressive list of early users, including the Ohio Supercomputer Center The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is a high performance computing and networking center headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, United States (OSC-Columbus) with a division in Springfield, Ohio (OSC-Springfield). It was stablished in 1987 by the Ohio Board of Regents. , the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of nine United States Department of Energy (DOE) multiprogram national laboratories. The laboratory PNNL is located in Richland, Washington, and operates a marine research facility in Sequim, Washington. (PNNL PNNL Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ), Germany's Helmut Schmidt University The Helmut Schmidt University (originally known as the University of the German Federal Armed Forces Hamburg), located in Hamburg, Germany, is an educational establishment that was founded in the year 1973. and the SAHA Institute of Nuclear Physics The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) is an institution of basic research and training in physical and biophysical sciences located in Bidhan Nagar, Kolkata, India. The institute is named after the famous Indian physicist Megh Nad Saha, . (Calcutta, India). "Tracking the evolving chemical composition of a smoke plume produces a task so computationally intense that we assumed we would not be able to afford any computer capable of performing it," said Bryce Nordgren, Physical Scientist with the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab. "Reviewing the test case results from Cray restored our hope that we would be able to perform a scientifically meaningful simulation on our budget. We were particularly impressed with the Cray XD1's awesome scalability on this challenging interdisciplinary problem." The Cray XD1 supercomputer is ideal for the special needs of high-performance computing (HPC (Handheld PC) A palmtop computer that weighs less than one pound and runs specialized versions of popular applications. Microsoft coined the term for its Windows CE operating system, which is an abbreviated version of Windows. See Pocket PC. ) applications used by government and academia, as well as computer-aided engineering (CAE (1) (Computer-Aided Engineering) Software that analyzes designs which have been created in the computer or that have been created elsewhere and entered into the computer. ) in the aerospace, automotive and marine industries; weather forecasting and climate modeling; petroleum exploration; financial modeling; and life sciences research. "We evaluated many proposals from leading IT companies and decided on Cray because of the Cray XD1 system's excellent price-to-performance ratio," said Professor Hendrik Rothe, chair of Helmut Schmidt University's Laboratory for Measurement and Information Technology. According to Rich Partridge, Enterprise Systems analyst with D.H. Brown Associates, "With the XD1, Cray leverages its strong heritage to bring highly parallel, affordable supercomputing to a broad market of industrial, government and academic users. The Cray XD1 is not merely an Opteron/Linux parallel system; it is a 'Cray,' and that makes all the difference. This is a true supercomputer, with balanced performance that commodity designs just cannot achieve." About the Cray XD1 Supercomputer The Cray XD1 features the direct connect processor (DCP DCP - definitional constraint programming ) architecture, which removes PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). bottlenecks and memory contention to deliver superior sustained performance. According to the HPC Challenge benchmarks, the Cray XD1 has the lowest latency of any HPC system, with MPI MPI - Message Passing Interface latency of 1.8 microseconds and random ring latency of 1.3 microseconds. Tests conducted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center show that the Cray XD1 ships messages with four times lower MPI latency than common cluster interconnects such as Infiniband, Quadrics This is an article about the computing company, for use in mathematics, see quadric. Quadrics is a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. or Myrinet, and 30 times lower than Gigabit Ethernet employed in lowest-cost clusters. The Cray XD1's interconnect delivers twice the bandwidth of 4X Infiniband for messages up to 1 KB and 60 percent higher throughput for very large messages. The Linux/Opteron system runs x86 32/64 bit codes. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are available to accelerate applications, and the Active Manager subsystem provides single system command and control and high availability features. A 3VU (5.25") chassis provides 12 compute processors, 58 peak gigaflops (GIGA FLoating point OPerations per Second) One billion floating point operations per second. See FLOPS. (unit) gigaflops - (GFLOPS) One thousand million (10^9) floating point operations per second. , 96 GB/second aggregate switching capacity, 1.8-microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 84 GB maximum memory and 1.5 TB maximum disk storage. A 12-chassis rack provides 144 compute processors, 691 peak gigaflops, 1TB/second aggregate switching capacity, 2 microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 922 GB/second aggregate memory bandwidth, 1 TB maximum memory and 18 TB maximum disk storage. About Cray Inc. The world's leading supercomputer company, Cray Inc. pioneered high-performance computing with the introduction of the Cray-1 in 1976. The only company dedicated to meeting the specific needs of HPC users, Cray designs and manufactures supercomputers used by government, industry and academia worldwide for applications ranging from scientific research to product design, testing to manufacturing. Cray's diverse product portfolio delivers superior performance, scalability and reliability to the entire HPC market, from the high-end capability user to the department workgroup. For more information, go to www.cray.com. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements. There are certain factors that could cause Cray's execution plans to differ materially from those anticipated by the statements above. These include the successful porting of application programs to Cray systems and general economic and market conditions. For a discussion of these and other risks, see "Factors That Could Affect Future Results" in Cray's most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Cray is a registered trademark, and Cray XD1 is a trademark, of Cray Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
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