APPLICATIONS

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced plans to create a product line based on the "Red Storm" 40-TeraOp (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer it is developing for Sandia National Laboratories. The product, due out in 2004, targets the need for highly scalable microprocessor-based Linux supercomputers with high bandwidth. The Cray product is designed to be more efficient and cost-effective for challenging problems and workloads than clustered SMP systems ("clusters") available in the marketplace, according to company officials. "Superior efficiency and cost-effectiveness are major benefits of an advanced MPP (massively parallel processing) computer architecture like Red Storm, or the successful Cray T3E(TM) and ASCI Red systems on which Red Storm is modeled," said Peter Ungaro, Cray vice president, worldwide sales and marketing. "Even in very large systems with thousands of processors, this new MPP product is designed to function as a single high-efficiency computer, balanced with massive bandwidth to exploit its high-speed processors. "Red Storm is architected from the ground up for superior reliability and ease-of-administration," he said. "It provides redundancy features and powerful capabilities for system-wide management, including resiliency and repair in the event of disk or processor failures. This creates the basis for better scientific productivity and progress." Clusters loosely link together multiple servers or PCs with relatively low-bandwidth connections that are inadequate to make efficient use of the processors. "Clustered SMP systems with commercial interconnects are fine for handling small problems or big problems that are simple in nature, but their efficiency can drop to less than five percent on really challenging problems and workloads, versus five to ten times better than that for a well-designed MPP system like Red Storm," Ungaro said. "For challenging work, MPP systems are far more cost-effective." "We expect to get substantially more real work done, at a lower overall cost, on a highly balanced system like Red Storm than on a large-scale cluster," said Sandia's Bill Camp, Director of Computers, Computation, Information and Mathematics. Cray's product will use the Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron(TM) processors connected via a low-latency, high-bandwidth, three-dimensional interconnect network based on HyperTransport(TM) technology. Information on configurations, pricing and other details will be disclosed at the time of the formal product announcement. Ungaro said he expects initial customers will have requirements similar in complexity to Sandia's and will typically want versions of Sandia's Red Storm supercomputer in varying sizes. "We are evaluating market requirements for the next set of customers beyond that. We believe this product will substantially expand our addressable market." According to Cray President and CEO Jim Rottsolk, the decision to productize Red Storm was driven by customer interest. "Our partnership with the Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories on building the Red Storm system has allowed us to leverage that development for the entire supercomputing marketplace. "The Red Storm product plan reflects Cray's strategy to deliver high-efficiency, high bandwidth supercomputer systems. The new product will embody the same MPP design philosophy as our successful Cray X1(TM) scalable vector-based product in a highly cost-effective superscalar architecture and will be a key initiative for Cray," Rottsolk said. "With the Cray X1 and Red Storm products, Cray is demonstrating its comprehensive capabilities in the high-performance scientific and technical marketplace."