Cray Launches New Line of Midrange Supercomputers

Cray Launches New Line of Midrange Supercomputers

Cray XT5m(TM) System Expands Market for Cray's Successful Petaflops Technology

SEATTLE, WA and STUTTGART, GERMANY, Mar 18, 2009 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- At a technical workshop co-hosted with the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the launch of the new Cray XT5m(TM) line of midrange supercomputers, making the company's world-leading High Performance Computing (HPC) technology available to a broader set of users. HLRS is the first Cray XT5m customer.



"The new Cray XT5m product scales down Cray's successful high-end Cray XT architecture to cover the entire supercomputer market segment that starts at $500,000, expanding Cray's total addressable market in the process," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC. "Cray now has an opportunity to benefit from both a larger addressable market and the projected growth in the complete supercomputer segment."

The Cray XT5m system builds on the success of the Cray XT5(TM) product, whose installations include the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Cray XT5m supercomputer is a massively parallel processing (MPP) system that delivers performance, efficiency and manageability unrivaled in its price range with capabilities that previously were only available to the world's largest research facilities. With the introduction of the Cray XT5m series, more organizations and users can benefit from superior Cray performance, quality and service, while having the potential to scale to petaflops performance and beyond.

"The Cray XT5m will broaden our customer base while extending the Cray experience to new users and new market segments," said Cray CEO and President Peter Ungaro. "Cray XT5m users can now benefit from the proven technology of our larger Cray XT5 systems, offering unrivaled performance and usability, but at lower price points. We are very excited to be launching this system in Europe with HLRS as their partnership with the automotive industry is an excellent example of being able to leverage Cray supercomputers to a new set of customers and applications."

As with all Cray XT(TM) systems, the Cray XT5m series can be upgraded or expanded to take advantage of new technologies, such as next-generation compute processors, including AMD's upcoming Istanbul processors, I/O technologies and interconnects as they become available. The new product is a seamless extension of the Cray XT5 product line and Cray XT5m customers can upgrade easily to a Cray XT5 supercomputer if needed.

The CrayXT5m system incorporates a version of the Cray SeaStar(TM) network specially designed and optimized for systems with peak performance of less than 100 teraflops. This provides Cray XT5m systems with superior bandwidth, upgradeability and manageability at price points similar to those of commodity clusters. Offered with up to six cabinets, the Cray XT5m series features Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors and a Cray SeaStar-based 2D torus interconnect. The Cray Linux Environment(TM) enables the use of a wide range of open source tools as well as streamlined porting of a broad set of applications from independent software vendors (ISVs).

The new system is aimed at HPC markets in government, academia and industry. ESI Group's flagship physics-based simulation software, PAM-CRASH, is an example of a popular industrial ISV currently ported for the Cray XT5m product. Since the major engineering breakthrough in 1987 with the first full scale crash simulation of a car, ESI Group has been constantly striving to deliver innovative and state-of-the-art technology in crash test and safety simulation.

"We recently had the opportunity of porting ESI's PAM-CRASH to Cray's XT5 and XT5m platforms," said Raymond Ni, Crash & Safety Technical Director, ESI Group. "Thanks to our new parallel paradigm design, we can confirm excellent scalability up to 1024 CPU cores investigating a 2-million elements size car-to-car crash scenario. The computation time was brought down to 25 minutes including domain decomposition and result file merging."

PAM-CRASH is one of the key applications at HLRS, the first Cray XT5m customer. Researchers and scientists at HLRS will use the Cray XT5m system for basic and applied research in collaboration with scientific and industrial partners such as large, established companies in the German automotive industry.

"The Cray XT5m system supports our mission of providing researchers and scientists from both the automotive industry and the public sector with leading edge supercomputing technology," said Michael Resch, director of HLRS. "Cray has an excellent track record of developing innovative supercomputing systems that meet a wide range of research needs. We are excited to be the first Cray XT5m customer and partner to open a new era in MPP computing together with Cray. With the Cray XT5m, we get a leading edge MPP system and the power of a Cray supercomputer that supports our scientific endeavors as well as our financial objectives."

To reduce energy use and control operating costs, the Cray XT5m system employs innovative packaging technologies and an efficient power conversion train. Each system can be air- or liquid-cooled. In an air-cooled configuration, the design offers unparalleled processor density, using less air per watt than other air-cooled configurations. The optional Cray ECOphlex (TM) (PHase-change Liquid EXchange) technology can dramatically reduce the operating costs associated with cooling and provide flexibility in datacenter design and implementation.

The Cray XT5m system compute blades are designed for maximum power efficiency with only the necessary components needed for massively parallel processing: processors, memory and interconnect. The 400/480VAC power supplies in each cabinet connect directly from the power grid without transformer and power distribution unit loss, further contributing to reduced energy usage and lower cost of ownership.


About Cray Inc.

As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Last updated: Apr 7, 2020 at 12:58 pm CDT