14 DAY TRIAL // XT 4 is the latest supercomputer being built by Cray. You might think that another supercomputer won't change the world. Well, that may be true in some cases but not when you have 30,000 dual core Opterons working for you.
According to Cray, the new monster is capable of a one petaflop peak performance when needed. Evolved from the XT3 system, the actual XT4 array is capable of common, scalable environment compilation, resource management, work scheduling and multiple I/Os. The storage capabilities are globally shared, using a parallel file system. As for the connectivity, multiple network interfaces link it to other resources.
"While the theoretical peak speed of supercomputers may be good for bragging rights, it is not an accurate indicator of how the machine will perform when running actual research codes -- which is what our 2,500 users are most interested in. To better gauge how well a system will meet the needs of our users, we developed SSP, a sustained system performance benchmark suite. Under this real-world performance test, the new Cray XT4 system will deliver over 16 teraflops on a sustained basis," said Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab.
The Cray SeaStar2 interconnect chip is used to link all the CPU lines together offering routing capabilities that take advantage of the native Hyper Transport links since each Opteron processor is linked with its own chip.
"Unlike commodity clusters, the Cray XT4 supercomputer is built from the ground up to provide a scalable, balanced system in order to support the most demanding applications. The Cray XT4 system builds upon our highly successful Cray XT3 supercomputer in almost every aspect, providing enhanced scalability, performance and reliability in a system that is easily upgradeable to protect a customer's investment for years to come," said Cray President and CEO Peter Ungaro in an earlier statement.
Cray XT4 arrays are already available. At the moment, they come preinstalled with dual cores based upon the Opteron chip but Cray officials say that the XT4 is fully quad core capable and that they will deliver XT4 with preinstalled quad cores when AMD will offer this alternative.