Cray Unveils XC30 Supercomputer

By DE Editors

Cray  announced the launch of its next-generation high-end supercomputing system, the Cray XC30 supercomputer, previously code-named Cascade.

The Cray XC30 combines the new Aries interconnect, Intel Xeon processors, Cray’s software environment, and new power and cooling technologies to create a production supercomputer that is designed to scale high performance computing (HPC) workloads of more than 100 petaflops, the company says.

“After several years of incredibly hard work focused on completing the most ambitious R&D program in our company’s history, today’s unveiling of the Cray XC30 supercomputer is an exciting moment for Cray employees and our customers who have been eagerly anticipating what is an amazing new system,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “As a follow on to our most successful, productive line of supercomputers, the Cray XC30 is the realization of our Adaptive Supercomputing vision and will provide researchers, scientists and engineers with a system that can adapt to fit their most demanding applications. We’re off to a great start with more than $100 million in contracts for this system, and we believe the Cray XC30 series of supercomputers will allow a broader base of users to leverage the world’s most advanced supercomputing technology.”

Cray’s new system features the HPC-optimized Aries system interconnect;  a new Dragonfly topology that frees applications from locality constraints; a new cooling system that utilizes a transverse airflow to lower customers’ total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment that also supports a range of ISV applications; Cray’s HPC-optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a variety of processor types including the Intel Xeon processors.

The Cray XC30 will utilize the Intel Xeon processors E5-2600 product family, and with these Intel processors, Cray XC30 systems can scale in excess of one million cores, the company says. Additionally, future versions of the Cray XC family of supercomputers will be available with the new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, based on the next-generation NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture.

Early shipments of the Cray XC30 are starting now, and systems are expected to be widely available in first quarter of 2013.

For more information, visit Cray.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.