back to article Cray scales to over 100 petaflops with 'Cascade' XC30 behemoth

Hot on the heels of the delivery of the 20-plus petaflops "Titan" CPU-GPU hybrid supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week, Cray has launched what is unquestionably a much better machine, the long-awaited "Cascade" system developed in conjunction with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and sporting …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes, but can it play...

    ....you know the rest.

  2. Piro Silver badge

    AMD's niche destroyed

    In this market, anyway. I guess they couldn't deliver enough performance (or volume at one time), so Intel is back on the cards, even though it meant making a new interconnect.

    Sad, but inevitable.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AMD's niche destroyed

      The article misstates it: " the Opteron 6300s announced this week, do not support PCI-Express 2 links either through the chipset or the CPU itself" - the new AMD chips *only* support 2.0.

      The lack of PCIe 3.0 support is what kills it here. The entire Cray architecture is built on PCIe and, IMHO, this is one of the few areas where 2.0 vs. 3.0 is a *really* big deal.

      I could be wrong of course... but PCIe 3.0 seems to be a key component of Cray's new architecture and I doubt they could get the feeds, speeds and scaling they are claiming without it.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does it have a locking centre diff or Hill Descent? ;)

  4. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Happy

    Hands up everyone who wants to over-clock this machine

  5. FartingHippo
    Happy

    "engineers sometimes keep ideas in reserve for emergencies and continued employment"

    And it will be ever thus.

    *****

    Kirk: How much refit time before we can take her out again?

    Scotty: Eight weeks, Sir, but ye don't have eight weeks, so I'll do it for ye in two.

    Kirk: Mr.Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?

    Scotty: Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?

  6. TXITMAN
    Flame

    Yeah. What happens when one of the blowers fails and takes out the remainder of the row?

    1. genghis_uk
      Stop

      Someone changes the hot swap blower...

      These things are not like data centres where you turn the lights out and have a skeleton support crew. Supers have an army of people looking after them - in fact the support contract is partly why they are so expensive.

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