The Cray

Cray

Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...

 XK6 is an enhanced version of the Cray XE6

Cray XE6

The Cray XE6 is an enhanced version of the Cray XT6 supercomputer, officially announced on 25 May 2010. The XE6 uses the same compute blade found in the XT6, with eight- or 12-core Opteron 6100 processors giving up to 2,304 cores per cabinet, but replaces the SeaStar2+ interconnect router used in...

 supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

, announced in May 2011. The XK6 uses the same "blade" architecture of the XE6, with each XK6 blade comprising four compute "nodes". Each node consists of a 16-core AMD

Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...

 Opteron

Opteron

Opteron is AMD's x86 server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture . It was released on April 22, 2003 with the SledgeHammer core and was intended to compete in the server and workstation markets, particularly in the same...

 6200 processor with 16 or 32 GB of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia Tesla

Nvidia Tesla

The Tesla graphics processing unit is nVidia's third brand of GPUs. It is based on high-end GPUs from the G80 , as well as the Quadro lineup. Tesla is nVidia's first dedicated General Purpose GPU...

 X2090 GPGPU

GPGPU

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units is the technique of using a GPU, which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the CPU...

 with 6 GB of GDDR5 RAM, the two connected via PCI Express

PCI Express

PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...

 2.0. Two Gemini router ASIC

ASIC

ASIC may refer to:* Application-specific integrated circuit, an integrated circuit developed for a particular use, as opposed to a customised general-purpose device.* ASIC programming language, a dialect of BASIC...

s are shared between the nodes on a blade, providing a 3-dimensional torus network topology between nodes.

An XK6 cabinet accommodates 24 blades (96 nodes). Each of the Tesla processors is rated at 665 double-precision gigaflops giving 63.8 teraflops per cabinet. The XK6 is capable of scaling to 500,000 Opteron cores, giving up to 50 petaflops total hybrid peak performance.

The XK6 runs the Cray Linux Environment. This incorporates SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a Linux distribution supplied by SUSE and targeted at the business market. It is targeted for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. New major versions are released at an interval of 3-4 years, while...

 and Cray's Compute Node Linux

Compute Node Linux

Compute Node Linux is a runtime environment based on the Linux kernel for the Cray XT3, Cray XT4, Cray XT5, Cray XT6, and Cray XE6 supercomputer systems based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. CNL forms part of the UNICOS/lc operating system from release 2.0 onwards...

.

The first order for an XK6 system was an upgrade of an existing XE6m at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre develops and supports technical computing for the Swiss scientific research community. It provides high-performance computing infrastructure that enables world-class simulation-based science....

(CSCS).

External links

• Cray XK6 product page