SCIENCE

At the 2010 Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, LA, global supercomputer leader Cray has announced the latest addition to its line of Cray XE supercomputers with the launch of the Cray XE6m system. With the new Cray XE6m supercomputer, researchers, scientists and engineers with midrange high performance computing (HPC) computational needs can now purchase a cost-effective system that is scalable, reliable and built on Cray's proven petascale technologies.

Available now, the Cray XE6m supercomputer includes the same features found in the high-end Cray XE6 systems, such as Cray's Gemini interconnect, the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment and powerful AMD Opteron processors. The scaled-down configuration of the Cray XE6m is designed to maintain an attractive cost of ownership, and extend Cray's presence in market segments that have needs for midrange supercomputing systems, such as the university, manufacturing, weather and life sciences communities.

"The Cray XE6m supercomputer is an exciting system for us because we can now take all of the innovative features and technologies of our Gemini-based supercomputers and offer that same functionality to both new and existing customers at a lower entry point," said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division. "While some companies approach scalability from the bottom up, we strongly believe in scaling from the top down. Under this approach, Cray benefits from an expanded base of customers, but more importantly, the HPC user community benefits from cost-effective access to industry-leading supercomputing technology."

Fully upgradeable from current Cray XT5m and Cray XT6m systems, the Cray XE6m supercomputer is also designed to give customers the ability to upgrade to future Cray systems and technologies. In September 2010, Cray announced that the Company is developing blades based on the NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs for the Cray XE6 supercomputer. The Cray XE6m supercomputer will also be available with blades featuring the same NVIDIA GPUs when they become available. Additionally, features currently available in the Cray XE6 system, such as the Cluster Compatibility Mode built into Cray Linux Environment, can also be found in the Cray XE6m system allowing users to run applications from independent software vendors without modification.

Another innovative feature of the Cray XE6m system is the hardware and software support for modern parallel languages such as Unified Parallel C and Co-Array Fortran. The City University in New York (CUNY), purchased a Cray XE6m supercomputer to exploit the advantages provided by these Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming languages. CUNY's users are working on a project to jump-start academic research in the development of PGAS-based applications.

Paul Muzio, Director of the CUNY HPC Center, stated, "Our staff and researchers at CUNY have extensive experience in the development of applications using Co-Array Fortran and Unified Parallel C. We will be applying that expertise and using the Cray XE6m system to address problems in engineering, bio-medical science and data intensive computing that require low latency inter-processor communications to support fine grain parallelism. Our experience has shown that the PGAS one-sided programming model is often a more natural and efficient approach to application development than the traditional two-sided, library-supported parallel programming model."

Dr. Michael Kress, vice president, Technology Systems, College of Staten Island, CUNY, said, "CUNY is the largest urban university in the United States with a total enrollment of over 450,000 students and 10,000 faculty members. It is the country's most diverse university with over 125 different languages spoken and where 42 percent of the students are first generation college attendees. The addition of the Cray XE6m, with PGAS programming model support, also adds diversity to our HPC infrastructure, now the largest in academia in the City of New York."

The system will be designated "Salk" after Dr. Jonas Salk, an alumnus of CUNY's City College of New York. CUNY's acquisition of the Cray XE6m system was made possible by grant CNS-0958379 from the National Science Foundation.

The Cray XE6m, along with the Cray XT5m and Cray XT6m, is the Company's third generation of its midrange supercomputer designed to effectively scale down Cray's high-end systems while providing the same benefits to an expanded base of users. The compute blades feature four compute nodes designed for high scalability in a small footprint and can be configured with up to 96 dual-socket nodes per cabinet. Each compute node is composed of two AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors (the eight and 12-core "Maranello" platform), each coupled with its own memory and dedicated Cray Gemini interconnect. The compute nodes in the Cray XE6m systems can also be configured with 32 GB or 64 GB DDR3 memory.

The Cray XE6m supercomputer, with prices starting at under $500,000, features the option of using the Company's industry-leading ECOphlex liquid cooling technology, designed to reduce the customer's energy usage and lower the total cost of ownership.