Cray has broadened its support for accelerators and coprocessors, and is now selling the Cray XC30 series of supercomputers with Nvidia Tesla K20X GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. According to the company, this marks the latest step in its Adaptive Supercomputing vision, which is focused on delivering innovative systems that integrate diverse technologies like multi-core and many-core processing into a unified architecture.
‘Our first experience with climate and materials science applications showed that replacing one of the multi-core processors in the XC30 with an Nvidia Tesla GPU boosts application performance and disproportionally reduced energy to solution,’ said Thomas Schulthess, professor at ETH Zurich and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, which was one of the first Cray customers to order a hybrid Cray XC30 system. ‘This provides necessary proof of principle in favour of hybrid compute nodes as a promising solution to the energy challenges we face in supercomputing.’
In addition to now being offered in both the Cray XC30 and Cray XC30-AC systems, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators are also available in the Cray CS300 line of cluster supercomputers.
