Cray's newest creation

SuperCheetah · Apr 8, 2002

Found this interesting little bit of news of at Slashbot:

http://www.cray.com/news/0204/xfersystem.html

CRAY INC. OFFERS WORLD'S HIGHEST-CAPABILITY EXPANSION MEMORY/DATA TRANSFER SYSTEM

System Can Transfer 100 Copies of Human Genome Per Second and Quickly Handle Other Very Large, Data-Intensive Problems

SEATTLE (April 8, 2002) - Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today announced the availability of the world's highest-capability expansion memory and data transfer system. The new system, compatible with Cray SV1eâ„¢ and Cray SV1exâ„¢ supercomputers, includes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per second-800 or more times faster than the 10- to 100-megabytes/second speeds typical with today's disk servers.

The field-upgradeable SSD system can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100 Human Genomes per second. With their 32-gigabyte central memories and the new SSD system, Cray SV1â„¢ series supercomputers now provide up to a quarter terabyte of ultrafast memory. They can also be linked to a virtually unlimited number of standard disk servers for additional capacity, and to other computer systems via high-speed networking.

"With the new SSD system, Cray SV1 series supercomputers can handle extremely large, data-intensive problems with unprecedented speed, convenience and cost-effectiveness," said Jerry Loe, Cray vice president of worldwide sales and service. "This will be particularly useful in bioinformatics, and for complex automotive and aerospace applications." The Cray SV1 series, named "Best Supercomputer" in 2001 by the readers of Scientific Computing & Instrumentation magazine, includes special hardware features for bioinformatics.

"With the new SSD, bioinformaticists will be able to work with several copies of the Human Genome at a time, or perform whole genome comparisons, or pursue drug design and discovery, without wasting valuable compute time waiting for standard disk data transfers," said Jef Dawson, Cray's manager of bioinformatics development and marketing. "The SSD can keep up with the Cray SV1 parallel supercomputers' processors, which perform up to 12 operations per clock cycle."

Dawson said the SSD will benefit virtually any application requiring large data sets. "The popular automotive application MSC/Nastran ran 2.5 times faster using the new SSD capability. Applications that run 'out of core,' including the popular GAUSSIAN chemistry codes, are also well suited to the SSD. You can think of the SSD as the world's biggest cache memory, or the world's biggest I/O buffer. Either way, it offers the world a new capability."

Simply put it has unbelievable speed and transfer rates. I wonder if I could get my hands on one of these babies...let's see where did I put that extra few million dollars I had stored for a rainy day???

boeingfixer · Apr 8, 2002

Super, We can use my truck, how many do you want ? I in for 4. You think we can hook them up in RAID ??

SuperCheetah · Apr 9, 2002

Hmmm...I'm thinking of making a Beowulf cluster of around 50 or so myself with these puppies providing the power. And yes, we definitely need to implement RAID into these drives. And the raw speed and power I would have in my hands then. It is good to dream I guess...

With all those computers I could solve the mysteries of the universe!!!

TechSpot

Cray's newest creation

SuperCheetah Newcomer, in training

boeingfixer Newcomer, in training

SuperCheetah Newcomer, in training