UK National Supercomputing service HECToR hosted by EPCC announced that their large Cray computing resource has been upgraded to a production XT6. According to the release, this marks the first XT6 system moved into production. The existing XT4 system has been reduced in capacity as a part of the upgrade.
The new XT6 system includes 20 cabinets with 464 compute blades. Each compute blade has two 12-core AMD Opteron Magny Cours processors clocked at 2.1Ghz. That’s 44,544 total cores. The interconnect is still the legacy SeaStar, but will be upgraded to Gemini in late 2010.
HECToR is hosted by EPCC at the Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) outside Edinburgh. Installation of the new XT6 system commenced in late May and was completed by early June. The system acceptance test and availability trials were completed in June and all users are now online.
For more info, read their full release here.