Cray is hardly new to the super computer industry, but its plans for the future are truly ambitious. Cray has namely received an order from Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is suppose to go online in 2008. The new super computer will be about three times as fast as today’s fastest computer system, IBM’s Blue Gene/L sporting a record performance at 350 teraflops. Which in turn means that Cray’s system would be the first to break the petaflops barrier. What is it then that would make this super system so fast? Among others 24 000 Opteron processors with four physical cores working at 2.6GHz. All in all 96 000 cores working together and this should results in quite decent performance. But it’s not only the number of processors that’s impressive.
“Cray Inc. of Seattle will supply the system, named Baker. It will run approximately 24,000 2.6 Ghz quad-core Opteron processors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The nodes will be housed in 187 liquid-cooled cabinets. The system, which is still in early stages of design, will have either 187 or 400 terabytes of working memory (depending on the cost of memory modules) and from one to 11 petabytes of storage.”
This system will really be something extreme and the fact that Cray is letting a power company construct a special power station capable of outputting 170 megawatt tells you a little bit of how much power such a system consumes. If the system would become the world’s fastest and even be able to achieve over 1 petaflops AMD really has something to be proud of.
Cray X1E
Source: GCN
