Cray Supercomputers New Perspective

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Cray SupercomputersNew Perspective

• Alex Ostrovsky
• CS147

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History

• Cray Research founded in 1972.
• Cray Computer founded in 1988.
• 1976 First product Cray-1 (240,000,000 OpS).
  Seymour Cray personally invented vector register
  technology.
• 1985 Cray-2 (1,200,000,000 OpS, a 5-fold increase
  from Cray 1). Seymour is credited with
  immersion-cooling technology
• Cray-3 used revolutionary new gallium arsenide
  integrated circuits for the traditional silicon
  ones
• 1996 Cray was bought by SGI
• In March 2000 the Cray Research name and business
  was sold by SGI to Tera Inc.

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Visual Tour
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Market Segment (from top500)
Count Share Rmax Sum (GF) Rpeak Sum (GF) Procs Sum
Pentium4 Xeon 232 46.4 422375 810977 142065
Itanium2 84 16.8 190357 243070 42048
HP 50 10 52503 92016 26064
Opteron 30 6 61729 102444 24796
Power4 26 5.2 90730 174387 24042
Power4 19 3.8 34874 68089 12966
Alpha 12 2.4 32414 46182 23512
Nec 10 2 47177 52669 6488
PowerPC 8 1.6 127194 176979 51664
Power 8 1.6 24465 36742 27732
Cray 7 1.4 16298 17869 1396
Hitachi SR8000 4 0.8 5152 6314 1548
Sparc 4 0.8 12076 24535 5348
MIPS 2 0.4 2461 4301 7168
Pentium4 1 0.2 1212 5753 940
Intel 1 0.2 2379 3207 9632
AMD Athlon 1 0.2 1017 1400 500
Power5 1 0.2 3068 5472 720
All 500 100 1127481 1872406 408629
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Supercomputer Architecture
  Count Share Rmax Sum (GF) Rpeak Sum (GF) Procs Sum
Scalar 479 95.8 1058853 1795555 399197
Vector 21 4.2 68628 76851 9432
All 500 100 1127481 1872406 408629
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Current Cray Products

• Cray X1 is the only Crays product with a unique
  vector CPU
• Competitors are Fujitsu, NEC, HP
• Cray XT3 and XD1 use AMD Opteron CPUs (series 100
  and series 200 accordingly)
• You can find full product specifications as well
  as additional information on current systems at
  www.cray.com

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Performance Measurements

• Performance is measured in teraflops
• Linpack is a standard benchmark
• Performance is also measured in memory bandwidth
  latency, disk performance, interconnects,
  internal IO, reliability, and others
• For example
• My home system, Athlon 750, gives about 34
  megaflops (34106 flops)
• Current mid-range supercomputers give about 40
  teraflops(401012 flops) which is 1,176,470
  times faster

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Scalable Architecture in XT-3
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Is Cray a good deal?

• Typical Cost approximately 30 million and above
• Useful lifetime 6 years
• Most customers use supercomputers at 90 - 98
  load
• Clustered supercomputers and machines build
  around common desktop components (AMD/Intel CPUs,
  memory chips, motherboards, and etc.) are
  significantly cheaper

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Future

• Crays Red Storm System in Sandia National
  Laboratories is running on Linux OS
• Current Cost 90 million
• Uses 11,648 AMD Opteron CPUs
• Current operational speed 41.5 teraflops
• Uses unique SeaStar chip, which passes messages
  between thousands of CPUs
• Upgrades are scheduled to be completed by the end
  of 2005 using dual-core Opteron
• Expected to reach 100 teraflops by the end of 2005

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References

• http//research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/craytalk
  /sld066.htm
• http//inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsup
  ercomputer.htm
• http//americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/cray.ht
  m
• http//web.mit.edu/invent/iow/cray.html
• www.top500.org
• http//www.spikynorman.dsl.pipex.com/CrayWWWStuff/
  
• http//news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39
  020357,39162182,00.htm