Communications of the ACM
Cray's Next Supercomputer Has Speedy Interconnect
The Cray XC30 supercomputer Aries is the first in a line of XC computers to be released over the next five years.
Cray's new XC30 supercomputer, known as Aries, features a new interconnect and a new routing topology that together could dramatically improve internal bandwidth.
"The rate that data needs to move in and out of the node has gone up, and the network must be able to sustain that," says Cray's Barry Bolding.
Aries is the first in a line of XC computers to be released over the next five years. Bolding says the XC architecture focuses on improving global bandwidth, which is the ability of the machine, when all of the processors are talking to all the other processors, to sustain a heavy workload. Aries' new interconnect enables each node to process 120 million gets/puts per second. Bolding says Aries is unique because it performs the duties of both a network card and a router, providing each node direct access to every other node in the system. The XC architecture also has a new network topology, called Dragonfly, that connects all of the nodes. Bolding notes the technologies were developed in conjunction with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High Productivity Computing System program. "The program was designed to produce the next generation of productive supercomputers," he says.
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