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Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
Red Storm is a supercomputer architecture designed for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. Cray, Inc developed it based on the contracted architectural specifications provided by Sandia National Laboratories. The architecture was later commercially produced as the Cray XT3.
The Cray XT3 is a distributed memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer designed by Cray Inc. with Sandia National Laboratories under the codename Red Storm. Cray turned the design into a commercial product in 2004. The XT3 derives much of its architecture from the previous Cray T3E system, and also from the Intel ASCI Red supercomputer.
The Cray XT4 is an updated version of the Cray XT3 supercomputer. It was released on November 18, 2006. It includes an updated version of the SeaStar interconnect router called SeaStar2, processor sockets for Socket AM2 Opteron processors, and 240-pin unbuffered DDR2 memory. The XT4 also includes support for FPGA coprocessors that plug into riser cards in the Service and IO blades. The interconnect, cabinet, system software and programming environment remain unchanged from the Cray XT3. It was superseded in 2007 by the Cray XT5.
Cray XMT is a scalable multithreaded shared memory supercomputer architecture by Cray, based on the third generation of the Tera MTA architecture, targeted at large graph problems. Presented in 2005, it supersedes the earlier unsuccessful Cray MTA-2. It uses the Threadstorm3 CPUs inside Cray XT3 blades. Designed to make use of commodity parts and existing subsystems for other commercial systems, it alleviated the shortcomings of Cray MTA-2's high cost of fully custom manufacture and support. It brought various substantial improvements over Cray MTA-2, most notably nearly tripling the peak performance, and vastly increased maximum CPU count to 8,192 and maximum memory to 128 TB, with a data TLB of maximal 512 TB.
HECToR was a British academic national supercomputer service funded by EPSRC, Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and BBSRC for the UK academic community. The HECToR service was run by partners including EPCC, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).
The Bigben supercomputer was a Cray XT3 MPP system with 2068 nodes located at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. It was decommissioned on March 31, 2010. Bigben was a part of the TeraGrid.
The Cray XT5 is an updated version of the Cray XT4 supercomputer, launched on November 6, 2007. It includes a faster version of the XT4's SeaStar2 interconnect router called SeaStar2+, and can be configured either with XT4 compute blades, which have four dual-core AMD Opteron processor sockets, or XT5 blades, with eight sockets supporting dual or quad-core Opterons. The XT5 uses a 3-dimensional torus network topology.
The Cray CX1 is a deskside high-performance workstation designed by Cray Inc., based on the x86-64 processor architecture. It was launched on September 16, 2008, and was discontinued in early 2012. It comprises a single chassis blade server design that supports a maximum of eight modular single-width blades, giving up to 96 processor cores. Computational load can be run independently on each blade and/or combined using clustering techniques.
Compute Node Linux (CNL) is a runtime environment based on the Linux kernel for the Cray XT3, Cray XT4, Cray XT5, Cray XT6, Cray XE6 and Cray XK6 supercomputer systems based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. CNL forms part of the Cray Linux Environment. As of November 2011 systems running CNL were ranked 3rd, 6th and 8th among the fastest supercomputers in the world.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.
The Cray XE6 made by Cray is an enhanced version of the Cray XT6 supercomputer, officially announced on 25 May 2010. The XE6 uses the same computer blade found in the XT6, with eight- or 12-core Opteron 6100 processors giving up to 3,072 cores per cabinet, but replaces the SeaStar2+ interconnect router used in the Cray XT5 and XT6 with the faster and more scalable Gemini router ASIC. This is used to provide a 3-dimensional torus network topology between nodes. Each XE6 node has two processor sockets and either 32 or 64 GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory. Two nodes share one Gemini router ASIC.
Kraken was a Cray XT5 supercomputer that entered into full production mode on February 2, 2009. Kraken was operated by the University of Tennessee and was the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia at the time. It was housed in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken was decommissioned on April 30, 2014.
The Cray XK6 made by Cray is an enhanced version of the Cray XE6 supercomputer, announced in May 2011. The XK6 uses the same "blade" architecture of the XE6, with each XK6 blade comprising four compute "nodes". Each node consists of a 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 processor with 16 or 32 GB of DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia Tesla X2090 GPGPU with 6 GB of GDDR5 RAM, the two connected via PCI Express 2.0. Two Gemini router ASICs are shared between the nodes on a blade, providing a 3-dimensional torus network topology between nodes. This means that it has 576 GB of Graphics memory and over 1500 CPU cores, several orders of magnitude more powerful than the best publicly available computer on the market.
Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan was the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
Catamount is an operating system for supercomputers.
A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been moving away from in-house operating systems and toward some form of Linux, with it running all the supercomputers on the TOP500 list in November 2017. In 2021, top 10 computers run for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as in the fastest one, or some variant of it or other Linux distribution e.g. Ubuntu.
XK7 is a supercomputing platform, produced by Cray, launched on October 29, 2012. XK7 is the second platform from Cray to use a combination of central processing units ("CPUs") and graphical processing units ("GPUs") for computing; the hybrid architecture requires a different approach to programming to that of CPU-only supercomputers. Laboratories that host XK7 machines host workshops to train researchers in the new programming languages needed for XK7 machines. The platform is used in Titan, the world's second fastest supercomputer in the November 2013 list as ranked by the TOP500 organization. Other customers include the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre which has a 272 node machine and Blue Waters has a machine that has Cray XE6 and XK7 nodes that performs at approximately 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second).
References
- 1 2 3 "Cray Announces Newest Upgrades to Cray XT Supercomputer Series". HPCwire. 2009-11-16. Archived from the original on 2013-01-27. Retrieved 2010-05-05.
- 1 2 "Cray XT6" (PDF). Cray Inc. 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-02-15. Retrieved 2010-05-05.
