CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, is pleased to announce the successful installation of an early-release version of the new Cray XE6 supercomputing architecture manufactured by Cray Inc.
The single cabinet, 20 blade system, contains 160 compute sockets and uses the new 2.1GHz, 12-core AMD Opteron (aka Magny-Cours) CPUs for a total of 1920 compute cores. The machine, which has been named Piz Palu, has a theoretical peak performance of 16TFlop/s and 2.5 Terabytes of memory. Furthermore the machine contains Cray’s next generation interconnect network, named Gemini, which promises increased performance and fault tolerance over the previous generation SeaStar technology. Moreover the Gemini interconnect promises better support for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Co-array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC). This Cray XE6 system is part of a joint collaboration between Cray and CSCS, and will enable CSCS and its user community to undertake testing and early familiarization with Cray’s next generation hardware and software technologies.
