Cray XMT Brings New Energy to High-Performance Computing.

The vastly increasing volumes and complexities of experimental and computational data pose significant challenges to traditional high-performance computing (HPC) platforms as terabytes to petabytes of data must be processed and analyzed. And the growing complexity of computer models that incorporate dynamic multiscale and multiphysics phenomena place enormous demands on high-performance computer architectures. Just as these new challenges are arising, the computer architecture world is experiencing a renaissance of innovation. The continuing march of Moore’s law has provided the opportunity to put more functionality on a chip, enabling the achievement of performance in new ways. Power limitations, however, will severely limit future growth in clock rates. The challenge will be to obtain greater utilization via some form of onchip parallelism, but the complexities of emerging applications will require significant innovation in high-performance architectures. The Cray XMT (figure 1), the successor to the Tera/Cray MTA, provides an alternative platform for addressing computations that stymie current HPC systems, holding the potential to substantially accelerate data analysis and predictive analytics for many complex challenges in energy, national security, and fundamental science that traditional computing cannot do. The Cray XMT has a unique “massively multithreaded” architecture (sidebar “Cray XMT System Description,” p38) and large global memory configured for applications—such as data discovery, bioinformatics, and power grid analysis— that require access to terabytes of data arranged in an unpredictable manner. The ability to solve our nation’s most challenging problems—whether cleaning up the environment, finding alternative forms of energy, or improving public health and safety—requires new scientific discoveries. High-performance experimental and computational technologies from the past decade are helping to accelerate these scientific discoveries, but they introduce challenges of their own. Cray XMT Brings New Energy to High-Performance Computing