Cray CX1

The Cray CX1 is a deskside high-performance workstation designed by Cray Inc., based on the x86-64 processor architecture. It was launched on September 16, 2008. It comprises a single chassis blade server design that supports a maximum of eight modular single-width blades, giving up to 96 processor cores. Computational load can be run independently on each blade and/or combined using clustering techniques.

Currently, blade options include a dual-processor Intel Xeon X33x0 module with DDR3 SDRAM (PC3-8500), dual-processor Intel Xeon E54xx module with DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-6400), a dual-processor Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 GPU/video module, and several dual-processor-driven RAID storage modules. The blade interconnect options are Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband.

Comparison with Cray XT5h

The CX1 and XT5h are fundamentally different architectures, and due to their differences, XT5 blades may not be used in place of CX1 blades, and vice versa. To compare the two:

• An XT5h supercomputer supports vector, FPGA, and scalar compute blades (X2, XR1, and XT4/XT5 blades, respectively), typically supported by service blades for network access and hosting a Lustre filesystem layered over several RAID modules.
  • The XT5h's operating system is UNICOS/lc, a combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Sandia's Catamount or Cray's Compute Node Linux.
• A CX1 supercomputer supports GPU and scalar compute blades (Nvidia Quadro and Intel Xeon, respectively), typically supported by enclosed network switches (Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband) and service blades hosting RAID modules.
  • CX1-supported operating systems include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows HPC Server 2008.

External links

• Cray CX1 product page
• Cray's First Windows-Based Supercomputer Puts a 64-Core Datacenter On Your Desk
• Mini office supercomputer - The H Online