At the GPU Technology Conference Cray announced that it is developing blades based on the Nvidia Tesla 20-series computing cards for the Cray XE6 product line. The combination of Cray's new Gemini system interconnect 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 high performance computing (HPC) in a single system.

"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," said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division.

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.

Fully upgradeable from the Cray XT5 and Cray XT6 line of supercomputers, the Cray XE6 system delivers improved network performance and features additional enhancements such as improved network resiliency, a mature and scalable software environment and the ability to run a broad array of ISV applications with the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment.

Nvidia Tesla C2050 and C2070 computing processor boards are single-chip cards with 3GB and 6GB (respectively) of on-board GDDR5 memory (with ECC enabled, user available memory will be 2.625GB for a C2050 and to 5.25GB for a C2070) with 384-bit interface operating at 1.5GHz. Nvidia Tesla 2000-series deliver up to 515GFLOPS of double-precision peak performance and are based on the GF100/T20 chips with 448 stream processors operating at 1.15GHz.

Nvidia Tesla 2000-series cards and compute modules are now available from all major suppliers of systems for high-performance computing, including Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, SGI and others.

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 $25 million research grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program.

Tags: Cray, Nvidia, Fermi, Tesla