Cray's Supercomputers Are Slowly Becoming Hypercomputers

Supercomputer manufacturer Cray is heading towards a new generation of computing machines with the advent of two new offerings in their XT supercomputer series. The new computers are built on the XT5 infrastructure and support field programmable gate arrays (fpgas), a feature that makes them entirely adaptive supercomputer systems.

Adaptive supercomputing is becoming more and more important, and Cray comes to meet the users' computing requirements with the XT5h machine, which is the direct successor of the previous XT3 and XT4 models manufacturer by Cray.

According to its producers, the XT5 computer blade quadruples memory capacity, doubles processor density and improves energy efficiency. The latter aspect is crucial in the supercomputer world, as a single cluster can absorb the power consumed by a whole neighborhood per day. Viable total costs of ownership (TCO) would make other interested users afford using supercomputers for their computational needs.

The new computer blades are rigged with 8 sockets and can handle dual-core and quad-core AMD Opteron processors, while supporting a total amount of 32 GB of locally addressable memory, linked with the processors through the Hypertransport / Seastar 2+ interconnect. A single machine can host up to 240,000 computing cores with their custom heatsinks and vertical coolers.

"The Cray XT5h system couples industry-leading scalar processing capability with high memory-bandwidth vector processing and reconfigurable co-processing using field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, establishing a new paradigm in high performance computing (HPC)," reads the press release. The FPGAS concept is not new, but it is the first implementation into a Cray machine. The XT5h are the latest additions into the high-performance computing niche.

Although Cray is an important player in the supercomputing industry, the most powerful supercomputer is IBM's BlueGene/L, built with support from the US Government and located at the Livermore National Laboratory in the USA.