First Cray XE6 Supercomputer installed at CSCS
July 28, 2010
CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, is pleased to announce the successful installation of an early-release version of the new Cray XE6 supercomputing architecture manufactured by Cray Inc.
The single cabinet, 20 blade system, contains 160 compute sockets and uses the new 2.1GHz, 12-core AMD Opteron (aka Magny-Cours) CPUs for a total of 1920 compute cores. The machine, which has been named Piz Palu, has a theoretical peak performance of 16TFlop/s and 2.5 Terabytes of memory. Furthermore the machine contains Cray's next generation interconnect network, named Gemini, which promises increased performance and fault tolerance over the previous generation SeaStar technology. Moreover the Gemini interconnect promises better support for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Co-array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC). This Cray XE6 system is part of a joint collaboration between Cray and CSCS, and will enable CSCS and its user community to undertake testing and early familiarization with Cray's next generation hardware and software technologies.
“Our company has now started shipping large Cray XE6 supercomputers and CSCS has been instrumental in helping us reach this important milestone,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “CSCS was the first Cray customer to receive an early version of our Cray XE6 supercomputer, which allowed us to make significant steps forward in putting production-ready Cray XE6 supercomputers in the hands of researchers and scientists around the world. CSCS has been a great partner of Cray, and we are honored and grateful in their help toward this important milestone. We are looking forward to our next endeavor together.”