Cray has created a new supercomputer which has broken the current petaflop record and scales up to more than 50 petaflops of processing capability. The Cray XK6 is powered by Cray’s Gemini interconnect, AMD Opteron 6200 processors, and NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs and runs a custom-built version of Linux.
The Opteron 6200 chips have 16 cores, and there will be up to 96, together with 96 graphics cards per cabinet. Just imagine what you could do with that sort of power in your home PC.
Technical Specifications and Capabilities
The Cray XK6 supercomputer is a marvel of modern engineering, designed to handle the most demanding computational tasks. The combination of AMD Opteron 6200 processors and NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs provides a balanced architecture that excels in both floating-point operations and parallel processing. Each Opteron 6200 chip, with its 16 cores, is optimized for high-performance computing (HPC) applications, making it ideal for scientific simulations, data analysis, and complex modeling tasks.
The Gemini interconnect is another critical component of the Cray XK6, offering high bandwidth and low latency communication between nodes. This ensures that the supercomputer can efficiently scale to thousands of nodes, maintaining performance and reliability. The custom-built Linux operating system is tailored to leverage the unique hardware capabilities of the XK6, providing a stable and efficient platform for running HPC applications.
Applications and Impact
The first customer in line for the brand new Cray XK6 system is the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Manno, which develops and promotes technical and scientific services for the Swiss research community in the field of HPC. They will be upgrading their current Cray XE6m system, nicknamed “Piz Palu,” to a multi-cabinet Cray XK6 supercomputer within the coming months.
The CSCS will use the Cray XK6 to support a wide range of scientific research projects, from climate modeling to molecular dynamics. The increased computational power will enable researchers to run more detailed simulations and analyze larger datasets, leading to new discoveries and advancements in various fields. For example, climate scientists can use the XK6 to create more accurate models of global weather patterns, helping to predict and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Similarly, biologists can simulate the behavior of complex biological systems at the molecular level, leading to new insights into disease mechanisms and potential treatments.
More information is available from the Cray XK6 press release. Prices of the XK6 range from $500,000 to $1 million, depending on the configuration. Enjoy!
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