Cray has a long and distinguished history of providing high performance computing technologies that allow our customers to push the frontiers of science and engineering.  Modern Cray systems do this by providing the world’s most scalable, general purpose supercomputing system for science, the Cray XT5.  At the heart of the XT5 are four key legs of scalable performance:  the processor, the network, the infrastructure and the software.  Today, we welcome the introduction of a processor that breaks new ground in scalability, the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor.

We have been enthusiastically preparing for the arrival of AMD’s new processor, and we are pleased to be able offer both our new and existing customers a tremendous step forward in terms of performance, efficiency, price-performance and energy optimization. Simply put, our customers are going to love the level of scalability this processor provides.

The Cray XT series of supercomputers, including the Cray XT5 and the recently introduced Cray XT5m, equipped with this processor will feature a groundbreaking 12 cores per dual-socket computational node. The XT5m system, affectionately known as the “Mighty Mini,” will provide a powerful 1,000 to 6,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a single cost-effective, scalable and fully upgradeable mid-ranged system. With 10 to 60 teraflops in this mid-ranged system, this is certainly not your father’s mid-ranged supercomputer. The even more powerful Cray XT5 systems will provide virtually limitless scalability, ranging from 1,000 to more than 300,000 AMD Opteron processor cores in a fully scalable hardware and software infrastructure.

Since we design our infrastructure for ease of upgradeability, our existing Cray XT5 customers can easily install the new six-core processor in their current systems with a simple processor swap and BIOS update.  We have successfully migrated customers though four generations of AMD Opteron processor technology, from 1 to 2 to 4 and now to 6 AMD Opteron processor cores per socket and navigated the large system scalability challenges of each generation.

Our years of experience with these large HPC systems allows us to provide a proven, multi-core software environment that can take full advantage of this six-fold increase in scalability.  Our software, including the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) and Cray Programming Environment (CPE) masks the growing complexities of this multi-core environment and provides users and administrators a unified environment that is different from the standard “cluster” experience.

What does this new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor mean for Cray, its customers and the HPC community?

We have a simple vision of our place in high performance computing.  We want “better science” to be Cray’s sign and signature.  The Cray XT5, utilizing Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, was the first general purpose system to break the petaflops barrier, providing a platform for groundbreaking science to hundreds of researchers in dozens of disciplines within weeks of installation.  This new Six-Core AMD Opteron processor technology from AMD included in our XT5 and XT5m systems will mean more performance at a low cost, superior efficiency and more scalability.  It means that researchers, scientists and engineers that utilize Cray supercomputers can now leverage a dramatic increase in computational power to address some of the world’s most challenging and sophisticated problems.

In short, it means “better science” and that is the most important thing of all.

Barry Bolding is Vice President of Scalable Systems at Cray. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Cray testing and have not been independently verified by AMD