At the recent 2010 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, Cray announced that it is developing blades based on the Nvidia Tesla 20-Series GPUs for use in the Cray XE6 product line. The combination of Cray's new Gemini system interconnect (which is featured in the Cray XE6 system) paired with Nvidia GPUs will give Cray XE6 customers a powerful combination of scalability and production-quality GPU-based HPC in a single system.
'We spend a significant amount of time meeting with our customers and talking about how we can build the most scalable HPC systems that blend industry-leading technologies designed to meet their supercomputing needs,' said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division. 'Our customers have expressed a growing interest in having accelerator technology in Cray systems, and we believe a Cray XE6 blade with Nvidia GPUs will provide the performance, scalability, and reliability that a growing segment of our customer base is looking for. The use of GPUs as accelerators in the HPC marketplace is maturing, and we are excited to be working with Nvidia to offer this functionality to our customers.'
With this future addition, Cray will be able to offer its customers a full range of accelerator solutions for HPC – from the deskside to the supercomputer. The Cray CX line of deskside and midrange systems, including the Cray CX1 and Cray CX1000 systems, are currently available with Nvidia Tesla GPUs.
Cray and Nvidia continue to work together on the development of future GPU accelerator technologies in HPC as a potential path towards exascale computing. Cray is partnering with Nvidia on a team that was recently awarded a $25m research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) programme.
'The Cray XE6 is designed to solve the system challenges of petascale computing just as Tesla GPUs are providing the computational power efficiency to bring this level of computing to the larger HPC community,' said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla business at Nvidia. 'Cray's planned Tesla GPU-based system will be a powerful combination of technologies that will provide the highest level of performance and scalability for power efficient supercomputing.'
