CRAY XK6 Is General Purpose Hybrid Supercomputer Based On GPU Technology

The Supercomputer Company - CRAY announced the XK6 hybrid supercomputer based on GPU technology at 2011 Cray User Group (CUG) meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska. Capable of doing more than 50 petaflops (quadrillions of operations/second), the XK6 configuration features AMD Opteron(TM) 6200 Series processors, NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPUs along with Cray's Gemini interconnect. CRAY claims that the supercomputer introduces an innovative way to boost programmer productivity with unified x86/GPU programming environment. It features an array of powerful tools, libraries, compilers and third-party software. The company has created a custom version of operating system called "CRAY Linux Environment" which blends hardware and software to offer a scalable and highly reliable platform.

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CRAY has also bagged the first customer for the XK6 supercomputer system with Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). XK6 will be used for high performance computing applications used in various technical & scientific research & services. CSCS will upgrade their existing Cray XE6m system, nicknamed "Piz Palu," to the new XK6 system. CSCS will primarily used the enormous computing power of the upgraded system in weather forecasting, genetics, chemistry, biology, computer science engineering and experimental medicine. The company doesn't boast their creation's abilities, but calls it a 'general-purpose supercomputing system'.

Barry Bolding, VP of Cray's product division said that every part of the CRAY XK6 system has been engineered to meet the real world supercomputing challenges to enable researchers and scientists tackle the world's grandest challenges. It's important to note the growing presence of graphics processing units in supercomputers. GPUs are meant to assist the CPUs and take away the intense graphics related calculations way from them. It makes the CPU ready for handling the regular operations and perform the job it's meant for.

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