Author: Michael Vox
Date: 02:46:14 01/03/03
http://ww1.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/fixup.pl?story=http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/03/01/02/030102hncray.xml&dctag=servers "I wonder how many CPUs it takes to reach the 52 trillion mark and how many CPUs is included in the 2.5 million version of the hardware :)" Cray ships X1 system with IBM chips By Tom Krazit January 2, 2003 9:18 am PT THE X1 SUPERCOMPUTER from Cray is now available with ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips designed by Cray and manufactured by IBM, the companies said Thursday. Announced in November, the Cray X1 is considered by the Seattle company to be the world's fastest supercomputer, performing up to 52 trillion floating point-operations per second. The X1 uses both vector processing, especially appropriate for large number-crunching problems, and a DSM (distributed shared memory) system architecture, which allows memory to be distributed with a single processor, but shared by all processors, Cray said. Four 800MHz processors occupy a single node, and each processor comes with 16GB of RDRAM (Rambus dynamic RAM), according to documents on Cray's Web site. A maximum of 64 processors can be used with the air-cooled version of the X1, but any user needing to scale beyond 64 processors will require the liquid-cooled version. The air-cooled cabinets can handle four system nodes per cabinet, while the liquid-cooled ones come with 16 nodes in a single cabinet, which measures 43.5 inches by 82.25 inches, Cray said. Cray will market the X1, with a base price of $2.5 million, toward research organizations in both the public and private sector for applications such as weather modeling, aerospace engineering, and academic research, it said. The U.S. National Security Agency will also use the X1, which represents a return to the top of the supercomputer world for the U.S., overtaking Tokyo-based NEC's Earth Simulator. Cray is building a supercomputer for Sandia National Laboratories using the Opteron processor due in the first half of this year from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The machine, called Red Storm, is expected to be the world's fastest when it is completed in 2003. Tom Krazit is a Boston-based copy editor for IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.
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