The Cray CX1-iWS combines a powerful MS Windows 7 workstation with a fully-integrated HPC cluster running MS Windows HPC Server 2008. It will be sold via Dell.
The Cray CX1-iWS system – the 'iWS' stands for 'integrated workstation' – combines the interactivity of a workstation with the scale-out performance of a cluster conveniently packaged in a deskside form factor. Users can enjoy a highly responsive and interactive workstation environment (with eight cores of Intel Xeon processors) while initiating distributed jobs leveraging the integrated cluster resource with an additional 24 cores of Intel Xeon processing power. In total, 32 cores are available to the user or workgroup. The Cray CX1-iWS product aims to substantially boost productivity for engineers, scientists and researchers continually challenged with complex problems and little time to solve them.
Each Cray CX1-iWS system comes with one dual-socket visualisation workstation, a three-node compute cluster, storage and a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. The workstation node features an Nvidia Quadro graphics card that can support two high-definition monitors for visualisation.
Three standard Cray CX1-iWS system configurations are available, all based on the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series. The mid-range and advanced configurations add more cluster nodes, memory and storage. The advanced configuration includes eight 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon Series 5500 processors with 24GB of memory (6x 4GB DIMMS) per node, 160GB of disk per node, 4TB of storage, the 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and an Nvidia Quadro FX 5800 graphics card.
