Supercomputer Cray XE6, developed under the code-name Baker, has been officially announced. The supercomputer builds on the AMD Opteron 6100 family of processors and the system will scale up to more than 187 000 processors, or 3 million cores.
AMD Opteron 6100 is based on the new Magny Cours architecture and offers 8 or 12 cores per processor, and next year we will see the 16-core Interlagos. Still being able to push hundreds of thousands of processors in one and the same system is astonishing. This is possible thanks to AMD’s new Gemeni technology that creates extremely efficient data paths, not just between individual processors processors of Cray’s blade servers, but also between the connected servers.
With today’s processors Cray believes it can build an XE6 system with more than 1 million cores, if there are customers in need of such power. Performance will be market leading since a full installation will house about five times as many servers as the supercomputer Jaguar, the top 500 leader with 1.76 petaflops. Each blade server houses eight processor for a total of 96 cores (Magny Cours).
Cray XE6 blade server with 4 processors
Cray Linux Environment is an operating system based on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, which has been specially optimized for handling large clusters of servers.
Cray is expected to start selling the new supercomputer in Q3 and have already acquired orders worth over 200 million dollar from a variety of science institutes.
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