CRAY Launches the Cray CX1000 Supercomputer

By DE Editors

Cray Inc. has launched the Cray CX1000 line of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The rack-mounted Cray CX1000 supercomputer, priced to start at under $100,000, provides a hybrid supercomputing architecture built on Intel Xeon processors. Immediately after Intel launched its new Xeon 7500  processor series on March 30, 2010, Cray announced the completion of its Cray CX1000 series with the availability of its Xeon 7500 processor-based CX1000-S.

Configurable with Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 and Linux, the Cray CX1000 supports three different compute architectures within one product family. Cray, rather than defining “hybrid” as multi-purpose,  instead says that it has engineered the CX1000’s constituent technologies so that they can be mixed-and-matched in a single rack. This, according to the company, allows users of the CX1000 to architect a customized hybrid supercomputing system to solve their unique computationally intensive problems and workloads.

“The Cray CX1000 system is uniquely designed so that HPC users intent on solving scientific and engineering challenges can now apply the latest, most cutting-edge supercomputing technology—technology that includes some of the most important HPC architectures of the next decade,” says Ian Miller, senior vice president of the productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray, in a press statement. “Expanding our total addressable market is an important strategic goal for the company. From petascale technologies to deskside supercomputing systems using either CPUs or GPUs, we now provide a supercomputing solution for virtually any supercomputing need.”

Available in one to four chassis types in a single,  standalone cabinet, the three compute configurations for the Cray CX1000 system include the Cray CX1000-C, Cray CX1000-G, and the Cray CX1000-S. The compute-based Cray CX1000-C features the dual-socket Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series for scale-out cluster computing, while the Cray CX1000-G utilizes the NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for accelerator-based HPC.

The newest member of the series, the Cray CX1000-S offers users symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) nodes for up to 128 Intel Xeon 7500 series processors with Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology and 1TB of memory in a 6U system. QPI provides point-to-point high-speed links to distributed shared memory. With the technology, each processor core features an integrated memory controller and high-speed interconnect, linking processors and other components. Intel says that this technology delivers dynamically scalable interconnect bandwidth, improved memory performance, and “tightly integrated interconnect reliability, availability, and serviceability.”

The Cray CX1000-S server is offered in two configurations,  designated the SC and the SM. The Cray CX1000-SC compute node is made up of 1.5U “Building Blocks,” each housing 32 cores interconnected using Intel QPI. The Cray CX1000-SM management node is a 3U server with four Intel Xeon 7500 series processors (32 cores) and up to 256 GB of memory.

“The Intel Xeon Processor 7500 series is another step forward in giving Cray CX1000 users a best-of-class supercomputing solution architected with the latest, most advanced high performance computing technologies,” said Miller said in a press statement accompanying the announcement. “Pairing the Cray CX1000-S with the new Intel Xeon processors provides a building block approach for scale-up computing that is second to none. Many high-performance computing workloads, such as electronic design automation, require scale-up computing and these applications can now benefit from up to 1TB of memory in a single OS space.”

For complete details on the Cray CX1000 product line, visit Cray, Inc.

Go here for the Cray CX1000-C web page.

Go here for the Cray CX1000-G web page.

Go here for the Cray CX1000-S web page.

Download the Cray CX1000 series brochure.

See why DE’s Editors selected the Cray CX1000 as their Pick of the Week.