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)

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University (MSU) supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of nearly tripling its current processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.

With a current Linpack mark of 350 teraflops (peak: 420 teraflops), Lomonosov needs to generate an additional 650 teraflops of performance to achieve its goal. No small task. So far, there are only two computers that have broken the Linpack petaflop barrier, Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Lab, which holds the number one position on the TOP500 list, and Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Lab, with the number two spot. Lomonosov ranks 12th on the most recent edition of the TOP500 list and is the largest HPC system in the CIS and Eastern Europe.

Officials at Moscow State University held a meeting this week in order to establish a budget for the petaflops revamping of the Lomonosov system. According to Russian State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, MSU has prepared a feasibility study on the effectiveness of creating a petaflops supercomputer, and the matter will be brought up to the President and Chairman of the government for approval.

Total university funding in 2010 from the Russian federal government will amount to 1.5 billion rubles ($51 million). The anticipated cost of increasing the computer's performance to reach petaflop-level is about 900 million rubles, or almost $31 million, according to Moscow State University President Victor Sadovnichy. MSU has already invested 350 million rubles ($12 million) in the Lomonosov system, and the total project cost so far is 1.9 billion rubles ($65 million). MSU is ready to provide up to a quarter of the cost of hardware, said Sadovnichy.

Apparently, the amounts specified to upgrade the system refer only to the procurement and installation of equipment, and do not include system maintenance and electricity costs. Current power requirements are around 5 MW, which, according to Sadovnichy, is comparable to powering a small city.
"Lomonosov" and its predecessor "Chebyshev"  are responsible for many research breakthroughs, including an inhibitor of thrombin (a substance retarding the effect of the main component of blood clotting), as well as the development of urokinase, a possible cancer treatment. In addition to these undertakings, Lomonosov has been kept busy modeling climate processes, factoring large integers to solve cryptographic problems, and calculating the noise in turbulent environments.

The renovation work for transforming Lomonosov into a petaflop system is being put to a competitive bid, but is seems likely that T-Platforms will get the contract since it is the only Russian manufacturer with the know-how to implement such a project. And there's a partiality toward assigning work to national interests. State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, who backs the creation of a domestic petaflop supercomputer, prefers to support domestic producers of supercomputers, and urged caution against the procurement of foreign goods.
Mikhail Kozhevnikov, commercial director for T-Platforms, has already prepared a bid and decided upon an upgrade path for the petaflop system. The details of the proposed architecture have not been publicly declared, however a good guess would be that they're going to add new nodes based on the Westmere EP Xeon processors Intel just announced.

Specifically, since the current MSU super is based on the T-Blade2, Xeon X5570 2.93 GHz, it's not unreasonable to think they're bidding T-Blade3 blades using Xeon X5670 2.93 GHz parts (note, the T-Blade3 don't actually exist yet). Since the new Xeons only deliver about 40 percent more computational performance per blade than the existing ones, they'll still need a bunch more servers. Alternatively, they could be thinking about upgrading with the upcoming NVIDIA Fermi GPU server boards, due out in May. That would get them to a petaflop with a lot less hardware. (A dual-socket X5670 server would yield about 250 DP gigaflops; a 4-GPU Fermi server would probably deliver over 2 DP teraflops.)

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has allocated 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia, according to a recent APA report, further demonstrating Russia's desire to possess a world-class computer system, one that may be capable of a place among the top 5 of the revered TOP500 list. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, it looks like the Lomonosov upgrade will go forward, and Russia will take its place on the exclusive short-list of petaflop systems. But, in HPC, the final goal is always a moving target, as other groups also race for the coveted petaflops level and beyond.


(This article sourced from HPCwire.)

Fixstars Launches Linux for CUDA

Multicore software specialist Fixstars Corporation has released Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux (YDEL) for CUDA, the first commercial Linux distribution for GPU computing. The OS is aimed at HPC customers using NVIDIA GPU hardware to accelerate their vanilla Linux clusters, and is designed to lower the overall cost of system deployment, the idea being to bring these still-exotic systems into the mainstream.

The problem is that the majority of future HPC accelerated deployments is destined to be GPU-based, rather than Cell-based. While Cell had a brief fling with HPC stardom as the processor that powered the first petaflop system -- the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Lab -- IBM has signaled it will not continue development of the Cell architecture for HPC applications. With NVIDIA's steady evolution of its HPC portfolio, propelled by the popularity of its CUDA development environment, general-purpose GPU computing is now positioned to be the most widely used accelerator technology for high performance computing. The upcoming "Fermi" GPU-based boards (Q3 2010) substantially increase the GPU's double precision capability, add error corrected memory, and include hardware support for C++ features.

Which brings us back to Fixstars. The company's new YDEL for CUDA offering is aimed squarely at filling what it sees as a growing market for turnkey GPU-accelerated HPC on x86 clusters. Up until now, customers either built their own Linux-CUDA environments or relied upon system OEMs to provide the OS integration as part of the system. That might be fine for experimenters and big national labs who love to tweak Linux and don't mind shuffling hardware drivers and OS kernels, but commercial acceptance will necessitate a more traditional model.

One of the challenges is that Red Hat and other commercial Linux distributions are generally tuned for mass market enterprise applications: large database and Web servers, in particular. In this type of setup, HPC workloads won't run as efficiently as they could. With YDEL, Fixstars modified the Red Hat kernel to support a more supercomputing-like workload. The result, according to Owen Stampflee, Fixstars' Linux Product Manager (and Terra Soft alum), is a 5 to10 percent performance improvement on HPC apps compared to other commercial Linux distributions.

Fixstars is selling YDEL for CUDA as a typical enterprise distribution, which in this case means the CUDA SDK, hardware drivers, and Linux kernel pieces are bundled together and preconfigured for HPC. A product license includes Fixstars support for both Linux and CUDA. The product contains multiple versions of CUDA, which can be selected at runtime via a setting in a configuration file or an environment variable. In addition, the YDEL comes with an Eclipse-based graphical IDE for CUDA programming. To complete the picture, Fixstars also offers end-user training and seminars on CUDA application development.

(This news summarized from the HPCwire and full text pages can be reached their site)

JRT Offering the Tesla Workstation

JRT's new Tesla Workstation delivers the accelerated multi-core processing power. Designed to deliver groundbreaking performance, and power efficiency for compute and graphics intensive environments, the new JRT Tesla Workstation lets you create, design, render, and analyze, without compromise.

The new JRT Tesla Workstation offers outstanding performance and incredible graphics and memory up to 64 GB for technical and graphic intensive computing. The Tesla Workstation supports up to two 64-bit Dual/Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5200/5400 series processors and supports the full NVIDIA Quadro graphics and Tesla accelerator product lines. Designed with all new performance architecture for the research - critical, compute-intensive and graphically demanding workstation environments.

The JRT Tesla Workstation offers the latest high-end graphics cards that gives high level graphics performance for the most demanding visual applications in industries such as oil and gas, CAD, animation and 3D modeling.


Key Features

• Dual / Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors
• Up to 64 GB of Memory
• Dual PCI Express x16 Slot
• High Performance NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Card
• Up to 8 TB of Hot-Swap Storage
• Whisper Quiet Workstation (28 dB)
• NVIDIA Tesla C1060 Computing Processor

(For more information visit the product pages)