Cray said it plans to take high performance computing to a higher level via adaptive supercomputing.
The Seattle-based company announced plans to develop supercomputers
that integrate a range of processing technologies in a single platform.
These “adaptive supercomputing” systems, Cray said, will be able to solve
scientific and engineering problems more quickly and make programmers and
end users more productive by adapting processing to the requirements of each
application.
Where Cray now makes four separate specialized systems that maximize
technology like vector processing and massively parallel processing, the
company is looking to consolidate those in one system, moving to a blade
chips to optimize different applications
“One size doesn’t fit all,” Jan Silverman, Cray’s VP of corporate
strategy, told internetnews.com. “We want the machine to adapt to
different applications. Our vision is that the application will
automatically break out and choose the best processor for the job. We can
get five to ten and in some cases even a hundred times better performance
when a processor is optimized for the application.”
Cray said it will continue leverage its expertise developing compilers
and other software to automatically match an application to the processor
blade that is best suited for it.
The main reason Cray says it needs to move to a more integrated,
multi-purpose approach is the increasing complexity of applications HPC
systems are being used for. Weather forecasting, for example, that has to
take into account changes in the ozone layer, complex land and ocean
models, and other factors that require different applications. Many of those
applications are best suited to distinct processors.
Cray also gave AMD’s microprocessor roadmap got a strong endorsement.
Confirming an earlier announcement, Cray said it plans to collaborate with
the chip maker through at least the end of this decade. Cray already offers
the Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 supercomputers, based on Opteron.
AMD officials said the collaboration will further embed AMD
technology in Cray’s next-generation supercomputer products in the high
performance computing market. Cray also will continue to
develop its X1E supercomputer based on its own custom-built vector
processors.
Near term Cray and AMD announced they will collaborate on Cray’s planned
mid-2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government’s DARPA HPCS (High
Productivity Computing Systems). DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
The goal of the program is to provide economically viable, next-generation
computing systems for the national security, scientific and industrial user
communities that are able to run applications at sustained speeds of one
petaflop (million billion calculations per second) or more by the end of the
decade.
“In the near-term, the AMD Opteron processor roadmap provides our customers
a smooth upgrade path to multi-core systems,” Cray President and CEO Peter
Ungaro said in a statement. “Through 2010, AMD’s multi-core processor
roadmap and HyperTransport
stand out for their ability to help meet our aggressive performance goals.”
AMD is bullish on the broader, potential long term impact its work with Cray
might have. Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and
marketing officer at AMD said AMD’s collaboration with Cray is about more
than high performance computing. “We believe the innovation sparked by this
relationship, especially through our joint work on the DARPA HPCS proposal,
could help define the future of the IT industry.”
