Cray Unveils Its First GPU Supercomputer

An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputer giant Cray has lifted the lid on its first GPU offering, bringing it into the realm of top supers like the Chinese Tianhe-1A" The machine consists of racks of blades, each with eight GPU and CPU pairs (that can even be installed into older machines). It looks like Cray delayed the release of hardware using GPUs to work on a higher level programming environment than is available from other vendors.

Kraken Cray XT5

[Dremth]

I did some rough calculations regarding NICS's Kraken Cray XT5 and bitcoin mining. FYI, The Kraken was the 8th fastest supercomputer in Novermber of 2010. I determined that if the supercomputer put forth all of it's resources to mine bitcoins, it could generate 1,511.61 per day (or about $8,450.53/day). Granted, the Kraken has just regular CPU's doing the calculations. I could only imagine what a Cray supercomputer with GPU's in it would be capable of...

Will it support Fortran?

[LWATCDR]

There is still a lot of HPC applications written in Fortran with this run them?
Also how hard if any of a porting will be needed to get good results from this.

Re:"High level" programming environment? Sigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, you've tried it and it made you want to jump out of a window? OpenMP is an extremely simple, easy to use add-on to the C language. It is one of the two current standards used for parallelized scientific computing, and although it will eventually be succeeded by a language with more features, it will be difficult for its successor to match its ease and workmanlike grace.

I honestly have trouble believing someone could have much difficulty with it. If you want to have the work in a "for" loop parallelized the extremely mentally challenging thing to do is write

#pragma omp for

just before your for loop. Look at all that difficult message passing you have to contend with! And since you're writing scientific calculations, C generally lends itself to good clarity in the code. I worked with a math major who had only done the smallest bits of C and Java beforehand, and he picked up OpenMP immediately. If you can't handle it, you really should reconsider whether your talents lie in software development. If you want to see what a truly awful parallelizing language or API is, look at UPC - unified parallel C.