Intel Xeon 5400-Series to Power Cray CX1 Supercomputer

As some of you probably already know, Intel has just released its first 6-core Xeon processors, designed to bring a whole new level of performance to upcoming server systems. Although still newcomers on the market, the new server-class CPUs have already proven their potential, as they have been built in several server systems from major vendors, including HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Dell. However, it looks like one of the company's earlier Xeon series of processors will be powering a new Cray CX1 supercomputer that comes with pre-installed Windows HPC Server 2008.

 

“Taking advantage of the energy-efficient performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series, Cray’s CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most difficult computational problems,” said Intel’s General Manager of High Performance Computing Richard Dracott. “In addition, we continue to collaborate with Cray on developing the supercomputing technologies of the future, aimed at all segments of the HPC market.” Dracott added.

 

The newly announced Cray CX1 HPC (High-Performance Computing) has been designed to bring performance levels of standard HPC systems to smaller companies that can't afford such a system. The Cray CX1 incorporates up to 8 nodes and a total of 16 Intel Xeon processors to deliver the performance needed for this kind of working environments.

In addition, the new HPC can be equipped with up to 64GB of memory per node and a maximum of 4 terabytes of internal storage. The CX1 is the first system developed by Cray that incorporates Intel processors, in this sense, also being a milestone in that it marks the first ever collaboration between the two companies.

 

HPC has also announced the pricing details for the new CX1 Supercomputer, which can be acquired for tags ranging from $25,000 to over $60,000. As far as availability of the new server is concerned, no further info has been made public until now.