Thanks to a ComputerWorld link, I discovered there’s still a Cray supercomputer brand – and market too!
My fault, Cray is still alive and kicking…
The Cray XE6 supercomputer is designed to solve tough questions.
Built upon the Cray XT product line’s proven petascale technologies and scalable to over 1 million processor cores, the Cray XE6 system has the scalability, reliability and flexibility science and engineering demand.
Cray eventually survived the 80s and 90s falling of supercomputing architecture (no more Cold War to compute on… by the way) and emerged with new scalable architectures based on low-cost processors – this time AMD.
Software architecture now relies strongly on Linux clustering – as expected – and promises outstanding performances as well (check here Cray software specs).
I recall the time when X-MP and Y-MP supercomputers were starring in several Hollywood movies; I saw my very first Y-MP for real only in 1998 – not working anyway.
What about raw performance?
Cores: 1,536 or 2,304 processor cores per system cabinet
Peak Performance: 12.2 to 20.2 teraflops per system cabinet
Some Cray video resources available here.
[Via ComputerWorld]
