Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC (Search Enterprise Linux)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 6:51 UTC (Wed) by arasila (guest, #20891)
In reply to: Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC (Search Enterprise Linux) by dcoutts
Parent article: Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC (Search Enterprise Linux)

Cray could easily run Linux on their new shared memory supercomputers, it's just that for historical reasons they are using a (heavily modified) version of Irix (there has been some rumour of them changing to Linux in the future due to contractual issues over Irix).

This computer (Cray XD1) is a Linux system. Accoring to their own datasheet, the system is running "CRAY HPC enhanced Linux, Kernel version 2.4.21".

The system seems to be some kind of NUMA system, quite similar to SGI Altix, but with AMD Opteron CPUs instead of Itaniums. So, the guy is just trying to differentiate their from self-made Linux clusters and not to make any Linux vs. UNIX argument.

Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC (Search Enterprise Linux)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 11:59 UTC (Wed) by dcoutts (guest, #5387) [Link]

I meant they could run Linux on thier traditional style supercomputers as well as their new cluster style machines.

At the moment, Cray have basically got two products:

'cluster style' machines (eg T3E,XD1) comprising of lots of off-the-shelf processors linked together with a proprietary interconnect to create a NUMA shared memory system.

Their other type (eg SV1,SV2) are the more traditional machines with monster vector cpus in SMP nodes and linked together (NUMA) with Cray's proprietary interconnect. These are the ones that run Irix but could just as easily run Linux.