Cray's New Supercomputer, The XK6, Destroys Previous Records

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Remember when we in the United States were all sad when the Chinese announced they’d eaten our lunch and stuck us with the check in terms of supercomputers with their Tianhe-1A? Well, with the release of the Cray XK6, we not only just keyed their car with a key the size of a crowbar, but we doused that key in kerosene and lit it beforehand.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had any good supercomputer news, so it’s definitely encouraging to be talking about the Cray XK6. See, this sucker’s packing a whole lot of power in its systems, like Nvidia’s Tesla 20-series GPUs, AMD Opteron 6200 CPUs, and Cray’s own Linux-based operating system to generate–brace yourself–a whopping 50 petaflops.

Considering that the Tianhe-1A’s previous record stood at about 2.5 petaflops, and was already under risk from the IBM Mira, the Cray XK6 looks like it’s going to blow the Chinese supercomputer clean out of the water. And, interestingly enough, it’s just in time for the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list to come out again (they’ve been showing up in June and November alike since 2005), so it looks like there will be a new king of the computing hill directly.

But here’s the part that will really blow your mind: the Cray XK6 is upgradeable. Yes, that’s right–should anyone else look like they’re going to make a run on the XK6, whoever’s got it can slap in some fresh upgrades and boost the thing’s power even further, which, barring a moonshot in technology, should ensure that the Cray will be top of the heap for some time to come.

The applications for such computing power are colossal, and include applications in medicine, weather forecasting, astronomy, and more. And the best part is, there’s even a buyer ready for one of these–the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Manno, Switzerland is said to be the first ones to lay hands on one of these.

Anyone else follow the supercomputer stakes? Impressed by the growth of supercomputer technology? The comments section is waiting for you to talk about the most powerful hardware ever released, so head on down!