Cray Boosts Performance of Its Flagship Cray XC Supercomputers and High Performance Storage Systems

SEATTLE, WA and FRANKFURT, GERMANY--(Marketwired - Jun 20, 2016) -  At the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today introduced new performance breakthroughs that will provide customers with the fastest Cray® XC™ supercomputers and Cray® Sonexion® storage systems to date.

The new Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor family, formerly code named "Knights Landing", is now available in the Cray XC series of supercomputers, offering peak performance of over half-a-petaflop per cabinet -- a 2X performance boost over previous generations. Cray also unveiled the new Cray Sonexion 3000 scale-out Lustre® storage system, which features capacity- and performance-optimized configurations. In a performance-optimized configuration, the Cray Sonexion system delivers nearly 100 gigabytes-per-second of performance in a single rack.

"Our customers are taking on increasingly complex computational problems that are expanding the boundaries of supercomputing and storage performance capabilities," said Ryan Waite, Cray's senior vice president of products. "We partner closely with our customers to understand their unique requirements and deliver new systems that deliver peak performance. For many of our customers, Intel Xeon Phi processors and Lustre parallel file systems are critical components of their supercomputing infrastructure. Our close collaboration with Intel helps to ensure our Intel Xeon Phi processor-based solutions scale to the most demanding performance requirements and our close partnership with Seagate helps scale Lustre to new levels of performance and stability."

The Cray XC supercomputer is an adaptive supercomputing system that supports different processing and storage technologies in the same architecture. It also features a fully-integrated software ecosystem that leverages Cray's vast expertise in many-core and multi-core computing environments. With the new Intel Xeon Phi processor, Cray XC customers can take advantage of the Cray Programming Environment to optimize applications for best performance and memory usage. The software stack in the Cray XC system also includes enhancements to help customers optimize code and best utilize the new high bandwidth memory integrated in the Intel Xeon Phi processor.