CASS-MT Equipment & Facilities
The Cray XMT supercomputing system is a scalable, massively multithreaded platform with globally shared memory architecture for large-scale data analysis and data mining.
The system is purpose built for parallel applications that are dynamically changing, require random access to shared memory, and, typically, do not run well on conventional systems. Multithreaded technology is ideally suited for tasks such as pattern matching, scenario development, behavioral prediction, anomaly identification, and graph analysis.
Architectural Overview
The Cray XMT system was architected to leverage Cray’s MPP system design to create a scalable, reliable, and economical multithreaded supercomputing platform. The design is based on a Cray MPP compute blade but utilizes AMD Torrenza Innovation Socket technology to populate the AMD Opteron sockets with custom Cray ThreadStorm chips developed for multithreaded processing. A single Cray ThreadStorm processor can sustain 128 simultaneous threads and is connected with up to 8 GB of memory that is globally accessible by any other processor in the system.
Each Cray ThreadStorm processor is directly connected to a dedicated Cray SeaStar2™ interconnect chip, resulting in a high bandwidth, low latency network characteristic of all Cray systems. This allows the Cray XMT platform to scale from 24 to more than 8000 processors providing over one million simultaneous threads and 64 terabytes of shared memory.
As another technology using the Cray XT™ infrastructure, the Cray XMT platform includes separate AMD Opteron™-based service blades, can be configured for I/O, login, network, or system functions and can also provide scalar processing for applications that are best served by a combination of scalar and multithreading technologies. The Cray XMT system runs an operating system that distributes a multithreaded kernel to the compute blades and standard Linux on the service and I/O blades. This allows the compute nodes to focus on the application without being hampered by system administrative functions.
Systems Software & Programming Environment
This allows the compute nodes to focus on the application without being hampered by system administrative functions. MTK is a monolithic OS that provides a global shared memory view of the system API and is based on BSD 4.4 with Cray extensions.
CASS-MT Current System Configuration
- Cray XMT hardware
- 4 compute blades with 4 multithreaded ThreadStorm processors at 500 MHz (128 threads each) each
- 2 Service and I/O (SIO) nodes with dual 2.4 GHz Opteron processors
- Seastar2 high speed network
- Cray XMT software
- SIO nodes run a modified SuSE Linux environment
- C/C++ parallelizing cross-compiler environment hosted on the SIO nodes to target ThreadStorm code generation