Supercomputing 2011 ultimate slideshow

Cray Supercomputers
Cray’s big announcement at SC11 was its plan to build a $188 million supercomputer with its new XK6 blades based on the latest AMD Interlagos chips and Nvidia’s next-generation “Kepler” Tesla GPUs.

The system, to be built out throughout 2012, will be called Blue Waters and will reside at the University of Illinois in the federally funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Cray expects the finished system to pump out sustained performance of 1 petaflops, with peak performance of 11.6 petaflops.

In order to achieve the expected performance, Cray will use 49,000 AMD chips and Nvidia Kepler Tesla GPUs, packed into 235 Cray XE6 cabinets as well as a further 30 XK6 systems.

The supercomputer is expected to sport a total memory of 1.5 petabytes, will run CLE Linux and include Cray’s integrated Lustre parallel file system with over 25 petabytes of storage, and up to 500 petabytes of near-line storage. It will also come complete with 300 gigabits per second wide-area connections.

Cray’s SC11 presence was also bolstered by having been chosen by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to upgrade previous Top500 number one, Jaguar, to a new system called Titan for $97 million.