Cray XT3
| Industry | Supercomputing |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1972 |
| Products | Cray XT3 (Red Storm) |
| Website | www |
The Cray XT3, internally known as Red Storm, represents a distributed memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer engineered by Cray Inc.. Delivered to Sandia National Laboratories in 2004, this architecture expands upon the foundations established by the earlier Cray T3E and the Intel ASCI Red supercomputers.
History
The inception of Red Storm traces back to a 2001 initiative from Sandia National Laboratories, backed by an estimated $90 million budget. The commercial release of the Cray XT3 occurred in 2004, offering a balanced integration of processing power, memory capacity, network infrastructure, and input/output performance. This model was later replaced by the Cray XT4 in 2006, continuing the development trajectory of the XT series.
Architecture
Engineered for robust high-performance computing with built-in fault tolerance, Red Storm incorporates modular components that can be scaled by interconnecting multiple cabinets via networking. Each cabinet holds 96 processing units arranged in a three-dimensional torus configuration, which is optimized for collaborative workloads across nodes. These systems are designed to either execute computations or manage service functions.
Every processing element is equipped with a 2.4 or 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron processor (supporting up to dual-core), a proprietary "SeaStar" communication processor, and between 1 to 8 GB of memory. The SeaStar chip, based on the PowerPC 440 architecture, connects to the processor through a HyperTransport link delivering 6.4 GB/s bandwidth and provides six additional links at 7.6 GB/s each to adjacent nodes.
The XT3 operates on the UNICOS/lc operating system paired with a Lustre-based file system. Initially, compute nodes ran Sandia's Catamount microkernel (originating from SUNMOS), which was superseded by Compute Node Linux (CNL) starting with UNICOS/lc version 2.0. Service and I/O nodes run full SuSE Linux distributions, facilitating interactive user sessions, system administration tasks, software compilation, and job dispatching. I/O nodes are outfitted with PCI-X slots enabling Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections.
Performance metrics vary depending on system configuration; notably, in November 2007, Sandia’s largest XT3 installation achieved 102.7 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark, securing the sixth position on the Top500 list. After integrating XT4 nodes equipped with quad-core Opterons during upgrades in 2008, Red Storm attained a peak performance of 248 teraflops and was ranked ninth on the November 2008 Top500 chart.