Cray’s New Supercomputer, The XK6, Destroys Previous Records [Cray's XK6, A So-Called "General Purpose Supercomputer", Runs At 50 Petaflops, Destroying Any Previous Record That Came Before]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Wednesday, 25. May 2011 under: Computers & Computing, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

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!

TrEmEnDo
Steve, you don’t get it. There is not such a computer realized (just yet). This is a platform built to scale up to 50 petaflops, there is not such machine installed anywhere in the world and probably it won’t for a while. I hate to burst your bubble, but not, the U.S. has not regained the supercomputer crown yet. On the other hand you can be quite sure that the chinese “only” put together a bunch of U.S. engineered technology while they designed the interconnect technology (similar to Cray’s Gemini) so there is really no reason to itch so bad about it.
Another reason why a 50 petaflop system does not exist is because it is based on an unreleased CPU, the AMD Bulldozer-based “Interlagos” Opteron 6200 which will be released some time during this or the next quarter (some say it is weeks away). We’ll all have to see how those work…
http://nexus404.com/Blog Steve Andersen
TrEmEnDo–you’re right that it hasn’t been installed yet, but it has been purchased, at last report. So I am jumping the gun a bit in that sense, but it’s quite ready to go.