Cray adopts Microsoft for supercomputer line
Microsoft's entry into the supercomputing market took another step Tuesday as high-end system leader Cray announced plans for its first machine running the Windows HPC Server operating system.

The Cray CX-1 supercomputer.
(Credit: Cray)Cray announced the CX1 supercomputer, which will run HPC Server 2008 and have list prices between $25,000 and $60,000--prices which make it the company's most affordable system ever.
"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in the HPC market," Cray Senior VP Ian Miller said in a statement. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows HPC Server 2008, we're bringing the power of Cray supercomputing to a much wider range of new users with an affordable and adaptable system that provides incredible value and is easy to install, program and use with a broad array of applications from independent software vendors."
Cray billed the CX1 as an expansion of its lineup, aimed at universities, laboratories, and departments within big businesses. It said that the machine will be "the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power."
Although trying to offer Microsoft-based systems at the low end and proprietary systems at the high end may make sense for Cray, it's also an option that can be fraught with peril.
Consider the fate of SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics), which tried a similar approach with its Virtual Workstation product line.
For Microsoft, it is yet another step in the company's bid to be taken more seriously at the highest end of the computing market. Its current product, Windows HPC Server 2008, is the successor to the company's inaugural effort, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina.





Go MSFT ! Go Cray !
This is an act of desperation. The people buying these machine, are unlike MS customers: they are demanding, intelligent and knowledgeable.
No one who needs these machines like MS, much use any of their products. *nix rules the HPC market for a very good reason: it is flexible, stable and fast.
Look for Cray to diminish in the next year.
Some companies manage to escape decrepitude and stay alive as powerhouses of tech (see also IBM and HP), some simply hang on (Xerox, WYSE), and some show promise of resurrection (Novell)...
...but some (SCO, Cray, SGI, Wang, Tandem, Amdahl, Polaroid, etc etc) just fade away after technology first surprises, then surpasses them. They either get bought up, or they simply die.
Sad when it happens (I still have a board from the original Cray-1 hanging at the office @ home), but then you see articles like this - an also-ran in HPC (Microsoft) hitching the name of a has-been (Cray) to its bumper, all in the hopes of getting some buzz. The has-been gets one last shot at media glory, while the also-ran desperately tries to get some shine to its name.
If/when (more likely "if") the partnership actually does more than grand out some buzz, call me. Until then, it's not much more than seeing a losing baseball team pulling a long-retired coach out of the nursing home in the hopes of a miracle.
/P
Plus HPC supercomputers are being made by HP and IBM as well NEC. Not to mention a Microsoft HPC supercomputer ranked # 23 in the TOP500 supercomputers list.
in a compact casing. That is no different than running windows or linux hpc cluster on eight 1U/blade dual socket compute nodes. It would work fine for MPI and with a queuing system. When i heard this news, i thought Cray has done something like SGI did with their altix and numa. They have extensively modified Linux kernel to make it one of the most scalable OS in the world.
I think the last i heard, they had a new altix with 2048 cores in one smp image!! With lots of old climate models still using openmp, their is still a good, but small market for large smp servers.
If this just a regular 8 node cluster, i can't see there is anything special because of the Cray name in it compared to a regular cluster. If they worked with Microsoft to scale it to say a 64 or 128 core smp configuration,
that would have been different. Infact it would have also helped microsoft with scaling up their kernel for future.
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by brasscount
September 19, 2008 8:55 AM PDT
- Wow: This means we can process malware really fast!
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