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Company Success Stories - Cray Inc.
Taking Supercomputing to a New Level: Cray’s Red Storm Meets Sandia’s Performance Requirements
Profile
Cray Inc.
http://www.cray.com
April 22, 2003
"For us, the real differentiator was the open interface that HyperTransport™ technology provided; it allowed us to create a very fast network."
After winning the contract from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories to build a $90 million supercomputer, Cray Inc., the global market leader in high-end supercomputers, has the important task of designing a new supercomputer named “Red Storm.”
Expectations are high for Red Storm. The goal is to build what could be one of the fastest computers in the world in the next two years with the ability to handle more than 40 trillion operations per second, or 40 teraflops, using two calculations per clock cycle. Sandia National Laboratories has developed science-based technologies that have supported national security since 1949 and will use Red Storm to model and understand complex operations in the country's nuclear weapons stockpile.
Red Storm will be a massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer that performs nuclear weapons engineering simulations and other complex, 3D scientific and engineering simulations. Given the complexity of the applications involved, Red Storm has demanding requirements for microprocessor technology.
Because of these demanding requirements, Cray selected the AMD Opteron™ processor for the project and is expecting to use more than 10,000 processors. The AMD Opteron processor hit the mark on all counts, according to Wayne Kugel, Red Storm operations executive at Cray.
“The architecture had to work well with the existing application codes,” Kugel said. “It needed to have an open, high-bandwidth communication protocol and it had to run 64-bit codes, which have been standard for 30 years in high performance computing, while also being compatible with a large, important group of 32-bit codes.”
HyperTransport™ technology speeds up communication
In addition to the 32- and 64-bit compatibility provided by the AMD Opteron processor, its unique architectural features are helping Cray build a powerful computer that meets Sandia’s research requirements.
“For us, the real differentiator was the open interface that HyperTransport™ technology provided,” said Bill Camp, head of the Red Storm project for Sandia Labs. “It allowed us to create a very fast network.”
HyperTransport technology is a high-speed, high-performance link for integrated circuits designed to enable highly scalable, multiprocessing systems. In conjunction with a high-speed interconnect network such as the one being designed for Red Storm, HyperTransport technology enables the processors inside these systems to communicate with each other as much as 48 times faster than with some other technologies.
Cray is developing all boards and integration software and, most importantly, a custom interconnect technology that takes advantage of the HyperTransport technology protocol to provide high-speed, processor-to-processor communication. The interconnect technology, along with Cray’s lightweight operating system, are key factors for the anticipated performance gains.
Meeting the 64- and 32-bit challenge
Most of Sandia’s custom research applications and all of the lab’s vendor software applications are currently 32-bit.
“64-bit computing has long been the standard mode for many high performance computing applications, but also having the ability to run the body of codes that perform well in single-precision, 32-bit mode is a major advantage,” Camp said. “This flexibility built into the AMD Opteron processor was a crucial advantage over alternatives available in the market today.”
“The 32-bit/64-bit compatibility we get with the AMD Opteron processor means we move some 32-bit applications to 64-bit over time, if the nature of these problems would benefit from the larger memory spaces we can address,” Camp added.
Kugel agreed that this is an extremely important feature. “Sandia will be able to run 64- and 32-bit applications on the AMD Opteron processors right away,” he said. “That means they can run 99% of the existing code with just a recompile, and converting 32-bit applications to 64-bit mode won’t require a heroic effort.”
“The simultaneous 64- and 32-bit capability made the AMD Opteron processor stand out,” Camp concluded, “along with the integrated memory controller and the balance of low latency to memory and competitive bandwidth on the processor.”
With expected peak performance of 40 teraflops, Red Storm will be seven times more powerful than Sandia’s current supercomputer, called ASCI Red. Sandia plans to use Red Storm to model and simulate complex, mission-critical problems that to date have been intractable. Red Storm will perform calculations in a matter of minutes that would have taken months only a dozen years ago.
Cray plans to leverage the Red Storm experience and technology innovations to accelerate progress on the company’s product roadmap, which is targeting applications performance of a petaflop—one million billion calculations per second—by 2010.
“Our success with Red Storm and the AMD Opteron processor will help drive our long-term strategy,” Kugel said. “There has been a void for some time for customers looking for large-scale supercomputers with powerful commercial microprocessors, great bandwidth and low latency. We’re excited about this platform because it brings us back into this part of the market.”
About Cray Inc.
Cray’s mission is to be the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for customers’ most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to www.cray.com for more information about the company.
About AMD
AMD is a global supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer and communications markets with manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia. AMD produces microprocessors, Flash memory devices and support circuitry for communications and networking applications. The company was founded in 1969 and is based in Sunnyvale, California (NYSE: AMD).
For more information, contact Phil Hughes, AMD public relations at 512-602-4797.
©2003 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Other product and company names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies. |
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