HECToR Boots First Public Cray X2

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hectorHot off the presses, the High-End Computing Terascale Resource [HECToR] at the University of Edinburgh has officially integrated the first Cray X2 blade into its XT4 system. Formerly known as the Black Widow project, these X2 blades are the first to be publicly installed in the field, a big milestone for Cray. The first few X2 blades at HECToR will be integrated into a test and development system [TDS] for trial runs by the researchers. The production X2 blades will join the 60 cabinets of XT4 already installed on the floor in Edinburgh.

What is an X2 blade? The X2 blade is the vector portion of Cray’s hybrid computing architecture, the XT5h. The XT5h is midstream through a development project partially sponsored by the DARPA Cascade program, aimed at building an adaptive supercomputing platform.

For more info on the XT5h, read the Cray product briefing here. For more info on HECToR and their XT4, head over to their website here.

Comments

  1. The HECToR link is incorrect (https, should be http).

  2. HTTPS link works ok from my end. However, I we ahead and modified for HTTP

  3. I’ve successfully run about a dozen jobs on the X2 side so far. Nothing too exciting. Some prime number solvers. This at least let me test the system, batch scheduler, etc.

    The 1 millionth prime number is
    prime no. 1000000 = 15485863

    Quick, someone get out a pencil and paper and check the results! Oh the excitement. (-:

    Rich