100 Teraflop Cray to Use Opterons

ackthpt writes "Code named Red Storm, Cray and Sandia National Laboratories (US Dept. of Energy) to build a 100 Teraflop super computer employing AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors. Alluded to in the WSJ (non-free-as-in-beer subscription required), also in Infoworld, and Reuters."

Return of Vector Processing

[drhairston]

"Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk said Red Storm reflects Cray's strategy to deliver high-efficiency, high bandwidth supercomputer systems. "Red Storm embodies the same design philosophy as our new Cray X1(TM) vector-based product in a highly cost-effective superscalar architecture and will be a key initiative for Cray."

Quoted from the Cray Press Release [cray.com].

Ah, I remember my days on the venerable Cray Y-MP, optimizing my programs for vector processing. I am unsure how Cray has managed to make a combined parallel-vector machine like the Y-MP [uiuc.edu] out of PC chips provided by AMD, but I do not envy the programmers who must now begin the task of vector-optimizing their code to take advantage of this beast.

I had hoped that this idea died with Cray. Apparently not.

Heating issues?

[Spazholio]

Now, I know that my little ol' Athlon runs hot as a mother, so I can't imagine the cooling necessary to keep this baby running at an optimal temperature. Last I heard (and I could be mistaken), Crays were cooled by bring submerged in liquid nitrogen, and more recently with some sort of liquid plasma cooling (don't ask me, I have NO idea how something like that would work). Does anyone have any information on how they're going to keep this thing from incinerating itself the moment it's turned on?

Water cooled

[djstrehl]

This will be really cool because I would imagine this will be water cooled like Cray's other computers. I can see the online adds now.. "Personal water cooling setup. As seen on the Cray Red Storm"

next generation == last generation

[jukal]

Indeed, things do not look very good for AMD. Is there any AMD believers to explain how they will survive through next year? A $254 million loss in a quarter is not very convincing. Apparently, the have had to take a huge risk with putting the money in the design of this "new generation". Is it good enough?

Re:The mighty have fallen

[anzha]

Yes...and no. What we have been upset by is that people have been trying to shoehorn in all problem sets to MPPs and clusters. There are problems which do so, and do so well.

HOWEVER! Not all do by any stretch. Certain problems map well onto certain architectures.

The second reason is that quite frankly, clusters are boring. Rack, after rack of parts I can buy at Fry's or as a workstation just doesn't have much interest for us. I mean, where's the excitement in thousands of PCs...It's kewl for about 30 seconds and then you have to deal with teh headaches of keeping it up and running...

I'd love to have dozens of interesting architectures running around, not just vector, cluster, and MPP. If five of them could be spun out of slashdot - yeah, right - or anywhere, then we'd be very happy campers.

Re:Return of Vector Processing

[Boone^]

Japan's Earth Simulator is created from NEC SX-6 Vector processors, proving that not only hasn't the "idea" died, but it's doing very well thank you very much. Besides, who said that a machine made with AMD Opteron processors has anything to do with vectors?

Local Politics Needs Heat Spreader

[4of12]

It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.

That's right boys and girls.

On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning [theinquirer.net] a while back).

Re:Heating issues?

[yknott]

Flourinert is a whole bunch of fun. You can actually buy it for about 200 bucks a gallon. A few people have tried overclocking their computers by immersing their computers in the stuff. Check it out here [ninjamicros.com] and here [octools.com]

Re:Heating issues?

[stak]

>some derivative of an artificial blood plasma, I believe, which is made by 3M) So if you were to shoot it, it would bleed?

Re:next generation == last generation

[Brian Stretch]

Simple. AMD crammed as much bad news as possible into Q3 and held up shipping their shiny new Athlon XP 2400+ and higher chips to distributors until the first day of Q4. Accordingly, Q4 revenues are going to be much higher than Q3, AMD's net loss will be considerably lower, and they'll hang in there just fine until the Opteron ships in early Q2 (late Q1?) next year.

AMD also took the unusual step of accelerating their changeover to 130nm and the new Thoroughbred Revision B core that those neato new 2400+ and higher chips use and letting old inventory burn off during the resulting downtime during the last two quarters.

I say "unusual" because Intel did just the opposite. They dumped lots of crippled 2GHz Celeron processors onto the market rather than shut down their old 180nm fabs and they brought lots of new 130nm capacity online. They have no prayer of finding buyers for all the chips they now have the capacity to build and the sales channels are choked with rapidly aging Intel inventory. Their ASPs are eroding and the Xeon line that sustains their profitability is going to get Hammered in about 6 months, assuming no Tier 1 OEMs grow a pair and start offering AMD Athlon MP servers and workstations before then.

Soooooo, AMD's future looks pretty good, depending on how badly Intel panics at the mess they've gotten themselves into.

Re:Return of Vector Processing

[Anonymous Coward]

I am unsure how Cray has managed to make a combined parallel-vector machine like the Y-MP

The X1 looks more like the T3 (composed of Alpha chips) than the Y-MP. That 3-D mesh, highspeed interconnect approach to latching all the processors together is what Red Storm and X1 share. [ It isn't the actually same interconnection network. Just similar in design philosophy.]

I'm curious as to what OS they are planning to run. Linux? A port of UNICOS (cray unix)?

do not envy the programmers who must now begin the task of vector-optimizing their code to take advantage of this beast.

The X1 is for all ready tuned vector code. In order to fully leverage Red Storm the programmer is likely going to have to customize the code (for for a MPP machine). More than likely Red Storm will run code that has been tweaked for ASCI Red even faster. That's one likely primary objective.

Hm.

[Arcaeris]

I was trying to do 100 trillion flops on my cluster, and it was like beep beep bleep bleep, and then, like, half of my data was gone, and I was like, "What?" It couldn't do it. It was totally good data. It was a bummmer.

My Cray's never let me down once.

www.cray.com/switch