Posts tagged with Jaguar

It’s pretty tough to have a smart discussion about the history of modern transportation without invoking the name of Henry Ford – an inventor whose name is synonymous with his product category.  The same can be said for Seymour Cray and the supercomputer.

Earlier today, Cray (the company) announced something pretty remarkable:  a new version of its highly successful Cray XT5™ supercomputer, scaled down for industry and enterprise computing.   The Cray XT5 is of course the heart of “Jaguar” – the world’s first x86 supercomputer to cross the Petaflop performance barrier and a stunning testament to the power of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor.

What makes this really interesting is how, with slight modifications and careful attention to managing power consumption, this world-leading system can now be more widely deployed in the private sector with the Cray XT5m™.  Energy, transportation, circuit design, manufacturing and finance are all markets that can benefit from national lab-caliber computing capability.

With the unique building block nature of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture, Cray has fashioned several fully elastic system designs that can scale up and out as needed.  For example, Cray’s “Red Storm” system has consistently grown in size and computing power to meet the demands of its mission, adding processors and easily moving from single-core to dual- and quad-core over the course of more than five years while remaining in the upper echelons of the TOP500.  That’s the kind of long-term deployment that can help private industry to remain competitive and profitable – and the Cray XT5m can deliver. 

With its strong foundation in industry-standard x86 processing, massive system scalability and innovative interconnect designs, Cray is well positioned to move everyone onto the Supercomputing highway.  And for our part, AMD plans to continue to turbo-charging the engine.

Jeff Underhill is a business development manager for High Performance Computing at AMD.  He is also a member of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium Executive Committee and its Ecosystem Chairperson.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.