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Explore the fascinating history of Cray Supercomputers, founded by Seymour Cray in 1972. From the groundbreaking Cray-1, which achieved 240 million operations per second, to the advanced Cray-2 and Cray-3 that utilized innovative technologies, Cray has consistently pushed the boundaries of computational power. This overview includes key milestones like the acquisition by SGI and the evolution of Cray's products, including the XT series. Discover how Cray continues to shape the future of high-performance computing with its unique architectures and competitive positioning.
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Cray SupercomputersNew Perspective Alex Ostrovsky CS147
History • Cray Research founded in 1972. • Cray Computer founded in 1988. • 1976 First product – Cray-1 (240,000,000 OpS). Seymour Cray personally invented vector register technology. • 1985 Cray-2 (1,200,000,000 OpS, a 5-fold increase from Cray 1). Seymour is credited with immersion-cooling technology • Cray-3 used revolutionary new gallium arsenide integrated circuits for the traditional silicon ones • 1996 Cray was bought by SGI • In March 2000 the Cray Research name and business was sold by SGI to Tera Inc.
Current Cray Products • Cray X1 is the only Cray’s product with a unique vector CPU • Competitors are: Fujitsu, NEC, HP • Cray XT3 and XD1 use AMD Opteron CPUs (series 100 and series 200 accordingly) • You can find full product specifications as well as additional information on current systems at www.cray.com
Performance Measurements • Performance is measured in teraflops • Linpack is a standard benchmark • Performance is also measured in memory bandwidth & latency, disk performance, interconnects, internal IO, reliability, and others • For example: • My home system, Athlon 750, gives about 34 megaflops (34*10^6 flops) • Current mid-range supercomputers give about 40 teraflops(40*10^12 flops) which is 1,176,470 times faster
Is Cray a good deal? • Typical Cost approximately $30 million and above • Useful lifetime – 6 years • Most customers use supercomputers at 90% - 98% load • Clustered supercomputers and machines build around common desktop components (AMD/Intel CPUs, memory chips, motherboards, and etc.) are significantly cheaper
Future • Cray’s “Red Storm” System in Sandia National Laboratories is running on Linux OS • Current Cost $90 million • Uses 11,648 AMD Opteron CPUs • Current operational speed – 41.5 teraflops • Uses unique SeaStar chip, which passes messages between thousands of CPUs • Upgrades are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2005 using dual-core Opteron • Expected to reach 100 teraflops by the end of 2005
References • http://research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/craytalk/sld066.htm • http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsupercomputer.htm • http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/cray.htm • http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/cray.html • www.top500.org • http://www.spikynorman.dsl.pipex.com/CrayWWWStuff/ • http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39020357,39162182,00.htm