Cray has just fired a nuclear salvo in the supercomputer wars with the launch of its XC30, a 100 petaflop-capable brute that can scale up to one million cores. Developed in conjunction with DARPA, the Cascade-codenamed system uses a new type of architecture called Aries interconnect and Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors to easily leapfrog its recent Titan sibling, the previous speed champ. That puts Cray well ahead of rivals like China's Tianhe-2, and the company will aim to keep that edge by supercharging future versions with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. High-end research centers have placed $100 million worth of orders so far (though oddly, DARPA isn't one of them yet), and units are already shipping in limited numbers -- likely by the eighteen-wheeler-full, from the looks of it.

Continue reading Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores

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Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.