Emerging tech Toolkit

Cray's nuclear simulator to hit mass market

Matt Hines CNET News

Published: 27 Oct 2003 16:40 GMT

Supercomputer maker Cray said on Monday that it is planning to release a line of products based on the Advanced Micro Devices-powered Red Storm machine it is building for the US Department of Energy.

Due out sometime in 2004, the supercomputers will utilise Cray's MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture, which it is employing in the design of Red Storm, a 40-teraflop (40 trillion calculations per second) device ordered by the DOE's Sandia National Laboratories. Like Red Storm, the new product line will be powered by AMD's Opteron processors and run on the Linux operating system.

Red Storm is being built under the DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing (ASC) initiative to create supercomputers that can, among other complex tasks, simulate nuclear explosions. It is believed that when Red Storm is finished next year, it could outpace the world's fastest supercomputer, Japan's NEC Earth Simulator.

The announcement signifies increasing momentum in the supercomputer space for AMD, which launched Opteron earlier this year in hopes of increasing its share of the corporate server market. Red Storm runs on 10,000 of the 246MHz processors. AMD has also landed Opteron-based supercomputer deals with the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Dawning Information Industry of China.

The new Cray product line aims to be more efficient and cost-effective than so-called clustered systems that loosely link multiple servers or PCs that have relatively low-bandwidth connections. The company contends that its more traditional supercomputers are able to make more efficient use of their processors.

Clusters that have "commercial interconnects are fine for handling small problems or big problems that are simple in nature, but their efficiency can drop to less than 5 percent on really challenging problems and workloads, versus five to 10 times better than that for a system like Red Storm," Peter Ungaro, Cray vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, said in a statement.

Cray's upcoming products will connect processors via HyperTransport technology, an emerging industry standard for high-bandwidth, chip-to-chip communication. Information on configurations, pricing and other details will be disclosed at a later date when the company makes its formal product announcement.

In related news, last week Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University announced that it had built a 1,100 dual-processor Macintosh G5 PC cluster that is likely to rank with the five fastest machines in the world.

In preliminary performance tests carried out on 2,112 of the system's 2,200 processors, the so-called Big Mac cluster achieved 8.1 teraflops, or trillions of operations per second. While the system is still being tuned, and final results won't be announced until next month, the performance figure would place the Big Mac at No. 4 on the list of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers.