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TITLE: 800 IBM ASICS POWER NEW CRAY-X1 SUPERCOMPUTER
IBM is the sole ASIC provider for the new CRAY-X1 supercomputer.
The machine contains 800 IBM ASICs, designed by Cray exclusively
for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts
as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5
million, and a total gate count of about 7.5 billion. The chips,
arrayed on multi-chip modules (MCM), utilize IBM's advanced
copper technology, Cu-08, which supports up to eight layers of
copper wiring. The layers are separated by an advanced "low-k
dielectric" insulation, linking hundreds of millions of
transistors to form up to 72 million wireable gates, all on a
single chip. Cu-08 can be used to create complete system-on-a-
chip designs, where elements such as processors, memory and
analog functions all are combined on one piece of silicon.
The Cray-X1 is expected to achieve up to 52.4 trillion
calculations per second (teraflops) of peak computing power and
65.5 terabytes of memory. U.S. list pricing starts at about $2.5
million. The high-efficiency, extreme-performance system is aimed
at the critical computing needs of classified and unclassified
government, academic research, and the weather-environmental,
automotive, aerospace, chemical and pharmaceutical markets. Cray
has also announced that it is the first company to accept the
challenge, as stated in a 1999 report of the President's
Information Technology Advisory Committee, to provide actual,
sustained (not merely "theoretical peak") petaflop computing
speed-1,000 trillion calculations per second-for critical next-
generation applications by 2010. Five early-production Cray-X1
units passed acceptance tests at the U.S. Army High Performance
Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) and undisclosed customer
sites, and that Spain's National Institute of Meteorology (INM)
placed an $8.4 million, multi-year order for a Cray-X1 system.
The AHPCRC is the first site in the DoD High Performance
Computing Modernization Program to acquire a Cray-X1 system.
AHPCRC scientists already have implemented widely used weather
forecasting, computational mechanics, and computational fluid
dynamics application codes on their two early production systems.
In August 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that Oak
Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) had been selected to test the
effectiveness of the Cray-X1 system in solving important
scientific problems in climate, fusion, biology, nanoscale
materials and astrophysics. Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, director of
the department's Office of Science, said the program is part of
an effort to provide the U.S. scientific community with computing
resources to match or exceed those of the new Japanese "Earth
Simulator," which has an effective speed more than 20 times that
of the fastest U.S. civilian supercomputer. Under the program,
ORNL initially will acquire a 32-processor Cray-X1 supercomputer
for evaluation. The Cray-X1 system is designed to scale to
deliver performance for key scientific applications greater than
the performance of currently available U.S. computers. It is the
first U.S. computer to offer vector processing and massively
parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture.
For additional information, access: IBM-CRAY
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FILENUMBER: 1103
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
IBM ASICS CRAY-X1 SUPERCOMPUTER
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: February 2003
TITLE: 800 IBM ASICS POWER NEW CRAY-X1 SUPERCOMPUTER
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