Product Review: Cray CX1000™ High(brid) Performance Computers

The Cray CX1000 series is a dense, power efficient and supremely powerful rack-mounted supercomputer featuring best-of-class technologies that can be mixed-and-matched in a single rack creating a customized hybrid computing platform to meet a variety of scientific workloads.

Cray is announced the Cray CX1000 system; a dense, power efficient and supremely powerful rack-mounted supercomputer that allows you to leverage the latest Intel® Xeon® processors for:

• Scale-out cluster computing using dual-socket Intel Xeon 5600s (Cray CX1000-C)
• Scale-through (GPU) computing leveraging NVIDIA Tesla® (Cray CX1000-G)
• Scale-up computing with SMP nodes built on Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology offering "fat memory" nodes (Cray CX1000-S)

High(brid) Performance Computing – The Cray CX1000 redefines HPC by delivering hybrid capabilities through a choice of chassis, each delivering one of the most important architectures of the next decade.


Cray CX1000-C Chassis
The compute-based Cray CX1000-C chassis includes 18 dual-socket Intel Xeon 5600 blades with an integrated 36-port QDR InfiniBand switch and a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch – all in 7U. With support for Windows® HPC Server 2008 or Red Hat Linux via the Cray Cluster Manager, the Cray CX1000-C system provides outstanding support for ISV applications as well as dual-boot capability for ultimate application flexibility. The Cray CX1000-C system maintains Cray's "Ease of Everything" approach by incorporating blades, switches and cabling all within a single chassis. The result is an easy-to-install system with compelling capabilities for scale-out high performance computing.

• Two high-frequency Intel® Xeon® 5600 series processors (up to 2.93 GHz)
• Large memory capacity (up to 48GB memory per blade with 4GB DDR3 DIMMs)
• One SATA HDD or one SSD drive or diskless

Cray CX1000-G Chassis

The GPU-based Cray CX1000-G chassis delivers nine double-width, dual-socket Intel Xeon 5600 blades, each incorporating two NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Cray CX1000-G systems allow users to maximize GPU performance with its unique architecture by eliminating I/O bottlenecks – an industry first. These 7U systems include an integrated 36-port QDR InfiniBand switch and a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. The Cray CX1000-G system is the best solution to your density limitations by offering 18 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs in a 7U form factor. Combining Intel Xeon 5600 performance with NVIDIA Tesla-based acceleration offers true hybrid computing options.

• Double-width blade
• Two Intel® Xeon® 5600 series processors
• Two NVIDIA® Tesla® M1060 GPUs
• Up to 48GB or memory per blade with 8GB DDR3 DIMMs
• Two ConnectX adapters providing single QDR IB channel

Cray CX1000-S Chassis

The SMP-based Cray CX1000-S server is offered in two configurations, offering up to 128 Intel® Xeon® 7500 series processors and 1 TB of memory in a 6U system. The Cray CX1000-SC compute node is made up of uniquely designed 1.5U "Building Blocks", each housing 32 cores interconnected using Intel QPI. The Cray CX1000-SM management node is a 3U server with four Intel Xeon 7500 series processors (32 cores) and up to 256 GB of memory.

• Coherency switch – a proprietary feature based on Intel QPI technology allowing scalability from a single "building block" of 32 cores up to a maximum of 4 "building blocks" with 128 cores in 6U
• Up to 1TB of memory (with 8GB DIMMS)
• Support for applications requiring extensive I/O capacity

(The more information about this product can be obtained from Cray's product pages)