Cray-Dell snatcher
Supercomputer maker Cray has announced its Cray CX1-iWS system, a pretty powerful supercomputer, but the size of an average desktop.
To fit in with the hip crowd this season, Cray says it has combined a trendy Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit) workstation with a fully integrated high-performance computing (HPC) cluster running Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008.
The beast of a desktop is being sold by Cray exclusively through Dell and is being billed as a workstation that leverages an integrated cluster to give it some extra computational kick.
Punters can choose between three different levels of workstation and compute performance, presumably; Super, more super and most super. All three flavours sport a two-socket Xeon 5500 workstation blade with an Nvidia Quadro FX graphics card in a Dell Chassis complete with a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch for node, network storage and outside world connectivity.
The mini-super can also call upon even more connectivity using Nvidia's much touted CUDA HPC programming environment, which allows remote workstations to dispatch computational work to the CX1-iWS' graphics cards.
The base version, which has the presumably super low price of around $40,000, boasts two 2.26 GHz Intel Xeon L5520 processors, 24 GB of main memory, a 250 GB disk and an Nvidia Quadro FX 380 video card. In case that wasn't enough to justify its hefty cost, the Cray-Dell also counts two compute blades, each with two L5520 processors, 12 GB of memory and a 160 GB disk for a local operating system. Another blade adds four 1 TB SATA disks.
