Cray to Add NVIDIA GPUs to XE6 Supercomputer

By DE Editors

At the 2010 GPU Technology Conference, Cray Inc. announced it is developing blades based on the NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs for the Cray XE6 product line. The company says the combination of Cray’s new Gemini system interconnect featured in the Cray XE6 system paired with NVIDIA GPUs will give Cray XE6 customers a powerful combination of scalability and production-quality GPU-based high performance computing (HPC) in a single system.

“We spend a significant amount of time meeting with our customers and talking about how we can build the most scalable HPC systems that blend industry-leading technologies designed to meet their supercomputing needs,” says Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray’s products division. “Our customers have expressed a growing interest in having accelerator technology in Cray systems, and we believe a Cray XE6 blade with NVIDIA GPUs will provide the performance, scalability, and reliability that a growing segment of our customer base is looking for. The use of GPUs as accelerators in the HPC marketplace is maturing, and we are excited to be working with NVIDIA to offer this functionality to our customers.”

Cray and NVIDIA continue to work together on the development of future GPU accelerator technologies in HPC as a potential path towards exascale computing. Cray is partnering with NVIDIA on a team that was recently awarded a $25 million research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program.

Launched in May 2010, the Cray XE6 supercomputer features Cray’s new Gemini system interconnect and is designed to bring production petascale computing to a new and expanded base of high performance computing users. Upgradeable from the Cray XT5 and Cray XT6 line of supercomputers, the Cray XE6 system delivers improved network performance and features additional enhancements such as improved network resiliency, a mature and scalable software environment and the ability to run a broad array of ISV applications with the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment.

For more information, visit Cray and NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.