Vendor Spotlight:

CRAY FOCUSES ON CAE, FOREST SERVICES WITH AVAILABLE XD1

Cray Inc. announced the general availability of the new Cray XD1 supercomputer, an Opteron/Linux-based system priced from under $100,000 to about $2 million (U.S. list) that handily outperforms similarly priced Linux clusters. The company also announced the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service is a Cray XD1 customer, which adds to an impressive list of early users, including the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Germany's Helmut Schmidt University and the SAHA Institute of Nuclear Physics (Calcutta, India).

"Tracking the evolving chemical composition of a smoke plume produces a task so computationally intense that we assumed we would not be able to afford any computer capable of performing it," said Bryce Nordgren, Physical Scientist with the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab. "Reviewing the test case results from Cray restored our hope that we would be able to perform a scientifically meaningful simulation on our budget. We were particularly impressed with the Cray XD1's awesome scalability on this challenging interdisciplinary problem."

The Cray XD1 supercomputer is ideal for the special needs of high-performance computing (HPC) applications used by government and academia, as well as computer-aided engineering (CAE) in the aerospace, automotive and marine industries; weather forecasting and climate modeling; petroleum exploration; financial modeling; and life sciences research.

"We evaluated many proposals from leading IT companies and decided on Cray because of the Cray XD1 system's excellent price-to-performance ratio," said Professor Hendrik Rothe, chair of Helmut Schmidt University's Laboratory for Measurement and Information Technology.

According to Rich Partridge, Enterprise Systems analyst with D.H. Brown Associates, "With the XD1, Cray leverages its strong heritage to bring highly parallel, affordable supercomputing to a broad market of industrial, government and academic users. The Cray XD1 is not merely an Opteron/Linux parallel system; it is a 'Cray,' and that makes all the difference. This is a true supercomputer, with balanced performance that commodity designs just cannot achieve."

Cray Inc. announced that the company is targeting computer-aided engineering (CAE) as a primary market for its new Cray XD1 Opteron/Linux-based supercomputer. The Cray XD1 product is "purpose-built" for high performance computing (HPC) applications, including CAE problems, and features breakthrough innovations in interconnect technology, high availability and ease of management. Cray is working with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to exploit the Cray XD1 system's advantages on widely used CAE applications. With U.S. list pricing starting at under $100,000, the Cray XD1 system promises to substantially outperform conventional Linux clusters in the same price range.

"The Cray XD1 stands out from the competition because it combines a very high- speed interconnect, high-scalability and high-availability features, and unique possibilities for additional application acceleration," said Rich Partridge, enterprise systems analyst at D.H. Brown Associates. "It's no surprise that major ISVs are rapidly aligning themselves with Cray to exploit this innovative system for CAE applications."

The Cray XD1 supercomputer is specifically designed to enable CAE users and their employers to bring higher-quality products to market faster and at lower overall cost than Linux clusters and other alternatives in the Cray XD1 system's price range. The new product makes true supercomputer performance available for the first time at mainstream pricing and in a familiar environment-the Cray XD1 supercomputer runs all x86 Linux applications using the MPI programming model.

"Cray will focus initially on the automotive, aerospace and marine segments within the CAE market," said Himanshu Misra, CAE business manager at Cray. "We have a long and proud history in these markets, more than any other HPC vendor, having sold the first supercomputer into the automotive industry in 1979. And Cray pioneered the use of HPC with CAE customers, such as Ford, Boeing, the Army High Performance Computing Center and others."

Cray is currently working with more than a dozen ISVs on CAE codes for the XD1, including Abaqus, Inc., ACUSIM Software, Inc., CD Adapco, ESI Group, Fluent, Livermore Software Technology Corporation, Mecalog SARL, and Software CRADLE, plus a co-development effort with Oceanic specifically for the Marine industry. Misra added that additional ISV agreements are expected in the coming months.

In addition, Cray also announced that the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service has selected the new Cray XD1 supercomputer to help improve the Forest Service's ability to predict and track the paths of smoke plumes from wildfires. Financial details were not disclosed.

"Tracking a smoke plume as it moves downwind from a fire requires all the computational complexity of a weather model run over a nationwide domain. Tracking the evolving chemical composition of said plume produces a task so computationally intense that we assumed we would not be able to afford any computer capable of performing it," said Bryce Nordgren, a Physical Scientist with the Forest Service's Fire Science Lab. "Reviewing the test case results from Cray restored our hope that we would be able to perform a scientifically meaningful simulation on our budget."

The Cray XD1 supercomputer excelled at running the test case on the software application the Forest Service will use for wildfire smoke plume trajectory prediction. The WRF-chem application couples weather prediction-wind speed and direction, precipitation, temperature and humidity-with the ability to do chemical analysis and dispersion prediction of smoke plumes in the atmosphere.

"We were particularly impressed with the Cray XD1's awesome scalability on this challenging interdisciplinary problem. For example, the Linux scheduler synchronizes the execution of tasks across the processors to the microsecond. Cray was the only vendor to offer that kind of customization," Bryce said.

The Cray XD1 supercomputer is scheduled to be installed this month at the Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana.

"The Forest Service's selection of the Cray XD1 supercomputer is another demonstration of the extra value that Cray can bring to customers pursuing critical research in the weather and chemistry markets. It is becoming clear that many of the most demanding science and engineering problems need more than what a standard commodity cluster can offer," said Peter Ungaro, vice president of marketing and sales at Cray. "The technologies engineered into the XD1 are enabling scientists and engineers to have access to supercomputing technologies that were once only limited to a small number of the largest institutions in the world. We are looking forward to our new partnership with the USDA Forest Service and welcome them to the Cray family."

About the Cray XD1 Supercomputer

The Cray XD1 features the direct connect processor (DCP) architecture, which removes PCI bottlenecks and memory contention to deliver superior sustained performance. According to the HPC Challenge benchmarks, the Cray XD1 has the lowest latency of any HPC system, with MPI latency of 1.8 microseconds and random ring latency of 1.3 microseconds. Tests conducted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center show that the Cray XD1 ships messages with four times lower MPI latency than common cluster interconnects such as Infiniband, Quadrics or Myrinet, and 30 times lower than Gigabit Ethernet employed in lowest-cost clusters. The Cray XD1's interconnect delivers twice the bandwidth of 4X Infiniband for messages up to 1 KB and 60 percent higher throughput for very large messages.

The Linux/Opteron system runs x86 32/64 bit codes. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are available to accelerate applications, and the Active Manager subsystem provides single system command and control and high availability features. A 3VU (5.25") chassis provides 12 compute processors, 58 peak gigaflops, 96 GB/second aggregate switching capacity, 1.8-microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 84 GB maximum memory and 1.5 TB maximum disk storage. A 12-chassis rack provides 144 compute processors, 691 peak gigaflops, 1TB/second aggregate switching capacity, 2 microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 922 GB/second aggregate memory bandwidth, 1 TB maximum memory and 18 TB maximum disk storage.

About Cray Inc.

Cray Inc. pioneered high-performance computing with the introduction of the Cray-1 in 1976. The only company dedicated to meeting the specific needs of HPC users, Cray designs and manufactures supercomputers used by government, industry and academia worldwide for applications ranging from scientific research to product design, testing to manufacturing. Cray's diverse product portfolio delivers superior performance, scalability and reliability to the entire HPC market, from the high-end capability user to the department workgroup. For more information, go to http://www.cray.com.