Cray’s petascale “Hood” XT-4 released

Via cray.com:

Cray’s first computer of their Rainier-line was annouced today, offering a peak-power of 1-Peta-FLOPS. Cray wants to consolidate all of their supercomputer product-lines in their “Rainier”-program, an effort to establish Opterons and Seastar2 technology. The XT-4, also nicknamed “Hood”, will have up to 30,000 dual-core Opteron CPUs and insane amounts of RAM.

XT-4 is now up for sale, although Cray already admitted that they have a backlog of outstanding deliveries.

Tech Tags: cray supercomputing

Cray Inc. Reports 2006 Second Quarter Financial Results

Cray Inc.’s quarterly financial results are finally available on their homepage.

News in short:

“Total revenue for the quarter was $38.5 million compared to $53.4 million in the same period of the prior year. Net loss for the quarter improved year-over-year to ($7.2 million) or ($0.32) per share compared to ($23.8 million) or ($1.08) per share in the second quarter of 2005. Cray reported total gross margin of 32.5 percent for the second quarter of 2006, a significant improvement compared to 8.8 percent in the prior year period. Product margin, which improved to 26.6 percent, was the principal driver. Service gross margin of 43.0 percent for the quarter was in line with the prior year.”

The New York Stock-Exchange doesn’t seem to like Cray very much although Cray was able to narrow their losses and decrease expenses; at the time of this writing (15:31 GMT) CRAY was down by 4.08%.

Tech Tags: cray business

Q2 2006 Cray Earnings Conference Call

Cray will present their quarterly earnings in a web-cast tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. PT / 21:00 UTC.

Could be interesting ’cause i really like to know how SGI’s chapter-11 bankruptcy affects their business.

Link to web-cast: Q2 2006 Cray Earnings Conference Call

Tags:
cray, business

IBM Opteron-servers supporting HTX

Via El Reg:

Since the annoucement that IBM will sell off Opteron-server a couple of days ago there were only little details available; now IBM annouced some details and they’re quite juicy: Three Opteron-server models will have HTX-slots.

The whole HTX-concept is really cool: You can plugin accelerator-boards or co-processors directly into AMD’s Hyper Transport Bus which enables direct communication with the CPU and Memory without going through a Memory Controller Hub or Northbridge. The latency is much lower as traditional connection-technologies like PCI-X.

Cray uses a similar approach with their SeaStar communication chip on the XT3 supercomputer.
Their Opteron-based XD1 has a latency of 1.7 us in the same cabinet from CPU-to-CPU, 2.0 us to remote cabinets – done by Hyper Transport.

This is going to be an interesting summer; HTX is the best invention since sliced bread imho.

Tags:
ibm, hpc, opteron, hypertransport, low latency

Bite me: Cray announces “Black Widow”

Via Dailytech:

Cray announced it’s latest supercomputer, dubbed “Black Widow”. It’s not completly clear on what kind of hardware the machine will be based, speculations claim it might be again Opteron-base, as the already existing Cray XT3.

We remember, the Cray XT3 is a massive-parallel supercomputer based on the Opteron-CPU; however, each Opteron-CPU got it’s Hyper Transport Channel connected to Cray’s proprietary SeaStar-chip, which incorporates 6 links to other CPUs, a DMA-controller and a service-port.
All the CPUs are interconnected in a 3D-Torus-Topology.

XT3 and “Black Widow” are both based on Cray’s “Rainier scalable infrastructure”.

More corporate tech-talk in Cray’s press release.

Sidenote: The Oak Ridge National Labs (already covered today) already has a XT3, codenamed “Jaguar“. Jaguar is no. 13 on the Top500 list. It’ll be upgraded to dual-core Opterons and boost it performance from currently 25-TeraFLOPS to 50-TeraFLOPS. Futures upgrade-phases are pointed out, once again, at Dailytech.

Tags:
supercomputer, cray, ornl, xt3, black widow