Burst Buffers are here! Today Cray announced the launch of the Cray XC40 supercomputer and the Cray CS 400 cluster supercomputer – the next-generation models of the Company’s high-end supercomputing systems and cluster solutions. Based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family, formerly code named “Haswell,” the new systems deliver a 2x improvement in performance over previous Cray XC and Cray CS systems.
The Cray XC40 supercomputer is available with the Company’s new DataWarp technology, which is an applications I/O accelerator that addresses the growing performance gap between compute resource and disk-based storage. DataWarp introduces a new tier of high performance flash SSD directly connected to the Cray XC40 compute nodes. DataWarp delivers a balanced and cohesive end-to-end system architecture from compute to storage.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has been investigating burst buffer capabilities for years and the DataWarp technology in the Cray XC40 Trinity system will provide the first multi-petabyte, multi-terabyte-per second burst handling capability ever,” said Gary Grider, High Performance Computing Division Leader at Los Alamos. “We expect DataWarp to be the first step in leveraging node-local non-volatile storage, which will decrease our TCO going forward.”
Cray’s DataWarp technology is available as an added feature to the Cray XC40 supercomputer. DataWarp is designed to improve application performance and drive down TCO for I/O intensive applications by:
- Bringing the fastest I/O applications as close as possible to the compute resources;
- Providing a flexible and balanced infrastructure mapping to different application use cases;
- Ensuring a cost-effective balance of I/O across all storage tiers;
- Creating a central pool of fast I/O resources that can be allocated in diverse ways; and meeting the worst case data I/O surge needs.
The Cray XC40 and CS400 products are a leap forward in our supercomputer and cluster capabilities,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of marketing and business development. “Our new next-generation systems include support for future processors and accelerators, and currently feature improvements in the Cray Programming Environment that are designed to dramatically improve performance and efficiency across both systems. With the innovative DataWarp I/O acceleration technology for the Cray XC40, as well as the advancements in our cluster solutions, we continue to provide our customers with a portfolio of industry leading supercomputing solutions that are well beyond our competition.”
Several leading high performance computing centers worldwide have recently signed contracts for Cray XC40 and Cray CS400 systems, including the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), the National Nuclear Security Administration, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, and the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program.
Additionally, Cray has just been awarded a contract to provide a Cray XC40 supercomputer to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. CSCS develops and provides the key supercomputing capabilities required to solve challenging problems in science and/or society and to enable world-class research. CSCS’s resources are open to academia, and are available to users from industry and the business sector. The Centre’s researchers and scientists will use its new Cray XC40 supercomputer to advance research in traditional areas such as material science, molecular biology, climate and atmospheric modeling, and geoscience, as well as areas that are new to high-performance computing (HPC) such as data science and analytics. The contract is valued at more than $9 million and the system is expected to be installed in late 2014.
We are excited about new opportunities provided by the additional Cray XC40 cabinets in our XC system,” said Prof. Thomas Schulthess, director of CSCS. “It will allow us to move HPC technology into new domains, such as data analytics, and greatly simplify our system setup through the integration of visualization and pre- and post-processing systems into our main supercomputing platforms. We will add new services for university partners that will greatly enhance productivity of scientists.”
In addition to utilizing the latest Intel Xeon processors, the Cray XC40 and Cray CS400 systems will be available with Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.
The Cray XC40 supercomputer powered by the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 product family is a powerful solution for the HPC industry,” said Charles Wuischpard, vice president Data Center Group and general manager of Workstations and HPC, Intel. “The Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 processor chosen by CSCS will define a new reference system for scientific communities, providing leadership performance for a wide range of applications compared to previous architectures.”
The Cray XC40 supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of today’s most demanding HPC users. Special features of the Cray XC40 supercomputers include: the industry-leading Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; innovative cooling systems to lower customers’ total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment supporting a wide range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types.
The Cray CS400 cluster supercomputers are scalable, flexible systems that consist of optimized, industry-standard building block server platforms into a unified, fully-integrated system. Available with air or liquid-cooled architectures, Cray CS400 systems provide superior price/performance, energy efficiency and configuration flexibility. The systems are integrated with Cray’s HPC software stack and include software tools compatible with most open source and commercial compilers, schedulers, and libraries. The Cray CS400 systems feature the Cray Advanced Cluster Engine, which is an essential management software suite designed to provide network, server, cluster and storage management capabilities that are necessary to run large, complex technical applications, as well as the Cray Programming Environment to improve the performance and ease of programming of clusters.
The Cray XC40 and CS400 systems are available now.
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