Technology

Building on the successful Cray XT™ product line, the Cray XT5™ system is the single most scalable Linux supercomputer. The Cray XT5 system combines unprecedented sustained application performance with exceptional manageability and reliability, lower cost of ownership and, with a Linux environment, broader application support to large supercomputer class machines.

Engineered to meet the demanding needs of HPC applications, each feature and function is selected in order to enable larger problems, faster solutions, and a greater return on investment. Designed to support the most challenging HPC workloads, the Cray XT5 supercomputer delivers scalable power for the toughest computing challenges.

• The Cray XT5 cabinet can accommodate both Cray XT4™ and Cray XT5 compute blades, creating system configurations matched to application requirements.
• Designed from the ground up for extreme scalability, the Cray XT5 includes a highly scalable global I/O performance ensuring high efficiency for applications that require rapid I/O access to large datasets.
• The Cray XT5 system provides a flexible Linux-based operating system, making it easier for a wide variety of applications to benefit from superior scalability and enabling streamlined porting of a broad set of ISV codes.
• The Cray XT5 system was designed for superior energy efficiency and lower operating costs. Innovative packaging and technologies, including a liquid-cooled option that employs Cray ECOphlex™ (PHase-change Liquid EXchange) technology, reduce power and cooling requirements, reducing energy consumption and operating costs.
• The Cray XT5 offers competitive price/performance with commodity clusters, while providing superior interconnect, bandwidth, upgradeability, manageability, and scalability.

Recognizing that no single architecture is ideally suited for all types of applications, Cray has developed the industry's first integrated hybrid supercomputer, the Cray XT5h™ system. With the Cray XT5™ system as its foundation, the Cray XT5h supercomputer integrates multiple processor architectures with a complete software development environment into a single system supporting diverse workflows with a common operational environment. The Cray XT5h system couples industry-leading scalar processing capability with high-bandwidth vector processing and reconfigurable FPGA acceleration, establishing a new paradigm in high performance computing (HPC).

• The Cray XT5h supercomputer surpasses the capabilities of commodity microprocessors by delivering higher sustained performance across select applications within an HPC workflow.
• With an architecture that supports a variety of processor technologies, the Cray XT5h includes scalar processors based on AMD Opteron™ dual- and quad-core technologies, vector processors, and FPGA accelerators.
• The Cray X2™ vector processing node is the extreme high bandwidth processing component of the Cray XT5h with more than 100 GFlops peak performance in 64-bit mode. The Cray XT5h with Cray X2 nodes create a system with unique global addressing capabilities programmable by Co-Array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC), which can solve problems beyond the capabilities of MPI.
• Reconfigurable computing with FPGAs is enabled with the Cray XR1™ blade, giving orders of magnitude speedup on select applications.
• The Cray XT5h marks a milestone on the path to Adaptive Supercomputing, Cray's vision for innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, surpassing today's limitations and meeting the market's demand for realized performance.