Cray preps new Opteron-based product line
Cray has given AMD's Opteron chip a big vote of confidence, saying it will roll out a new line of supercomputers based around the product.
In 2004, Cray will begin selling systems with anywhere from 64 to more than 10,000 Opteron processors. All of the supercomputer-style systems will have a custom interconnect developed by Cray to deliver the kind of internal bandwidth needed for complex technical computing tasks. The decision to roll out the Opteron-based product line follows a deal Cray won last year to create a 10,000-plus processor system for Sandia National Labs.
"These products won't be for everyone, but we think there are a decent number of customers out there," said Steve Conway, a spokesman at Cray.
Cray is trying to meet the demands of customers that cannot rely on loosely-coupled clusters of commodity hardware or clusters of SMP systems for their computing problems. Even relatively tightly-coupled clusters tend to see processor performance outpace memory and I/O performance, which is why Cray uses a MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture. Cray wants to create a single computer that uses commodity parts where it can - Opteron - and custom technology - such as the interconnect - where it has to.
