Cray XT4 and XT3 Supercomputers
Like previous MPP systems, the basic building block of the Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 systems is a PE. Each PE is comprised of one AMD processor (single, dual or quad core) coupled with its own memory and dedicated communication resource. This design eliminates the scheduling complexities and asymmetric performance problems associated with clusters of SMPs. It ensures that performance is uniform across distributed memory processes—an absolute requirement for scalable algorithms. Each Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 compute blade includes four compute PEs for high scalability in a small footprint. Service blades include two service PEs and provide direct I/O connectivity.
The Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 operating system UNICOS/lc™ is designed to run large complex applications and scale efficiently to 120,000 processor cores.
The AMD processor's native support for 32-bit and 64-bit applications and full x86-64 compatibility makes the Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 systems compatible with a vast quantity of existing compilers and libraries, including optimized C, C++, and Fortran90 compilers and high performance math libraries such as optimized versions of BLAS, FFTs, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, and SuperLU.
http://www.cray.com/products/xt4/
[Posted by: JcK | Date: 04/30/08 12:58:32 PM]