GOVERNMENT

Cray today reported that it expects to begin shipping its industry-leading Cray XT4 systems with new, ultra-powerful Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors by year-end. The company has already received significant orders for these enhanced quad-core systems, including orders from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, CSC Finland, Engineer Research and Development Center for the US Army Corps of Engineers and the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the HECToR national academic service. "Our customers are already achieving breakthrough results with the Cray XT4 system and quad-core technology will allow them to solve more complex problems faster, doing more accurate simulations," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "The Cray XT4 system was designed with quad-core performance in mind and we have seen early examples of excellent scalability and sustained performance with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and our advanced Cray SeaStar interconnect network. Quad-core will give new customers a big boost in performance and a substantial total cost of ownership win. It will do the same for our current customers at a low incremental cost, extending the useful life of their existing Cray XT3 and XT4 systems." The Cray XT4 system is a massively parallel processor (MPP) system that provides unrivaled sustained performance by balancing performance between powerful processors, memory, interconnect, and IO. Both hardware and software are designed to scale to more than 120,000 processor cores and over one petaflops of peak performance. Both the Cray XT3 and Cray XT4 systems can be upgraded to Cray XT4 systems with quad-core support. "We upgraded from single-core to dual-core in the field very smoothly, and we anticipate being able to do the same with the Cray XT4 system with quad-core support," said Buddy Bland, Project Director of the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "We are already running machines with 23,000 processor cores, and we have high expectations about our impending quad-core delivery." "The combination of Cray's innovative supercomputing expertise and AMD's revolutionary native multi-core technology and Direct Connect Architecture has made tremendous contributions to the supercomputing industry," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Division, AMD. "With the superior performance, memory scalability and overall system efficiency of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, AMD64 technology continues to be an integral component of Cray's successful MPP product line."