The Cray XT3, also known by codename '' Red Storm'', is a distributed memory

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

MIMD

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

designed by Cray Inc.. Cray collaborated with and delivered to Sandia National Laboratories in 2004. The XT3 derives much of its architecture from the previous Cray T3E system, and also from the

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

ASCI Red supercomputer.

History

Red Storm was developed in response to the

request for information A request for information (RFI) is a common business process whose purpose is to collect written information about the capabilities of various suppliers. Normally it follows a format that can be used for comparative purposes. An RFI is primarily ...

by Sandia's in 2001, Clay delivered on an approximately $90 million budget by 2004. In the same year, a commercial version called ''Cray XT3'' was released, achieving a technical balance between

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

, network, and I/O operations. XT3 was superseded in 2006 by the Cray XT4 as the second iterations of XT.

Architecture

Targeted to achieve long-running mathematical analysis, the system architecture was focused on high performance and fault tolerance. Red Storm was developed to offering customizable components and to scale by networking multiple cabinets together, each houses 96 processing elements, arranged in a 3-dimensional

torus In geometry, a torus (: tori or toruses) is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space one full revolution about an axis that is coplanarity, coplanar with the circle. The main types of toruses inclu ...

topology. This arrangement is optimized for shared tasks between neighboring processing elements, or nodes. Each set of cabinets forms a system which performs two primary tasks of either computation or service management. Each element comprises a 2.4 or 2.6 GHz

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Opteron processor with up to two cores, a custom " SeaStar" communications chip, and between 1 and 8 GB of RAM. The PowerPC 440 based SeaStar device provides a 6.4 GB/s connection to the processor across HyperTransport, as well as six 7.6 GB/s links to neighboring elements. The XT3 system runs an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

called UNICOS/lc, and with the file system leveraging Lustre. In UNICOS/lc 1.x, the ''Compute'' PEs run a Sandia developed

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

called Catamount, which is descended from the SUNMOS OS of the Intel Paragon; in UNICOS/lc 2.0, Catamount was replaced by a specially tuned version of Linux called Compute Node Linux (CNL). ''Service'' and ''IO'' PEs run the full version of SuSE

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and are used for interactive logins, systems management, application compiling and job launch. I/O PEs use physically distinct hardware, in that the node boards include PCI-X slots for connections to

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

and

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

networks. Though the performance of each XT3 model will vary with the speed and number of processors installed, the November 2007

Top500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

results for the Red Storm machine, the largest XT3 machine installed at Sandia, measured 102.7 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark, placing it at #6 on the list. After upgrades in 2008 to install some XT4 nodes with quad-core Opterons, Red Storm achieved 248 teraflops to place at #9 on the November 2008 Top500.

References

{{Cray computers Xt3 X86 supercomputers Computer-related introductions in 2004