Cray CX1 is something as rare as an “affordable” supercomputer for the mainstream market. Cray and Microsoft have decided to offer a high-performance cluster to customers requiring extreme performance but at the same time don’t have the biggest budgets. Cray CX1 is based on Intel’s Xeon platform and can be configured with up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors, either dual or quad-core. Each node can hold up to 64GB RAM and 4TB harddrive space.
“Systems can be configured with a mix of compute, storage and visualization blades to meet customers’ individual requirements. The quiet, deskside supercomputer features Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux. A three-year warranty with next-day, on-site Cray-certified support is standard.”
Microsoft contributes through its Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system and is quite eager to get a bigger cut of the fast growing High-performance computing (HPC) market.
Cray has put a lot of effort into keeping the prices reasonable. They start at around $12,500 USD and stops somewhere north of $50,000. Hardly a computer for the busy folding@home users, but still far cheaper than tailor-made supercomputers.
“With the Cray CX1 supercomputer’s breakthrough power, affordability and ease of installation and use, Cray is democratizing HPC – placing computing capabilities previously reserved for large research centers into the hands of technical workstation users. In fact, a Cray CX1 system would have ranked as one of the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world in 2004. Now, all of that computational power, previously accessible only to the few, is available to everyone.”
