APPLICATIONS

Cray XMT System Developed to Address Broader Market Opportunities With Solutions Providers: Cray Inc. today announced the Cray XMT platform, a massively multithreaded supercomputing technology that the company has developed for large-scale, state-of-the-art data analysis work. Previously code-named "Eldorado" and developed under a government partnership, the Cray XMT system is the first supercomputer to offer over one million concurrent processing threads in a single system. Through partnerships with third-party solution providers, Cray will make this massively multithreaded platform available for performing advanced data analysis, data mining and predictive analytics in markets such as financial services, business intelligence, bioinformatics, digital media and energy. The Cray XMT platform will be available in early 2007. The Cray XMT system joins the Cray XT4 supercomputer as the next innovative technology under Cray's Rainier program, the initial phase of the company's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The Rainier program aims to bring all Cray processing technologies onto a common Cray XT infrastructure, allowing diverse and challenging applications to run on a single, highly scalable foundation without compromising performance or usability. With custom massively multithreaded processor chips designed for compatibility under the AMD Torrenza initiative, the Cray XMT system leverages technology from the Cray XT3 and Cray XT4 systems to produce a new cost-effective, massively multithreaded supercomputer. "The Cray XMT platform implements an important new approach to overcome memory latency, offering the potential to substantially and cost-effectively accelerate data-intensive applications in a variety of sectors," said Jan Silverman, Cray senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development. "In partnership with government agencies and companies who develop integrated solutions, we expect this platform to provide levels of performance for data analysis that have never been achieved before." For large data-driven problems that today exist in unrelated and diverse data sets, massively multithreaded processing offers the potential for breakthrough performance increases. Each processor in the multithreaded Cray XMT system can handle up to 128 concurrent threads. The system is designed to scale up to more than 8,000 processors, yielding more than one million concurrent threads that can operate on as much as 128 terabytes (128 trillion bytes) of shared physical memory.