Today I got a chance to visit Cray Inc. (The supercomputer company) headquarters in downtown Seattle. I got to see in their lab the recently arrived Cray CX1 Supercomputer. This is the first product to be made after the partnership between Cray, Intel and Microsoft to bring the benefits of High Performance computing to desktops. This is a cool (with Cray’s patented cooling systems and low decibel noise) computer that you can put it under your desk (or as a Cray engineer said on top of the desk to show the world you have a Cray machine) and run demanding applications without a datacenter.

Venkatarangan-with-Cray-CX1_3

The machine sports state of the art specifications of Up to Eight Blades per Chassis and in each chassis – Single or Dual Intel Quad-Core Xeons (overall upto 16 Quad Core Xeons), 64GB per Blade (or Node) and so on.

The basic chassis costs about $8000 and an average configuration including few compute, storage and graphics nodes costs between $25,000 to $60,000. Not that expensive for owning a supercomputer. The part I love is that it runs Windows HPC 2008 and the front-display panel sports a Windows CE for showing the status.

I wish I can get one of our media customers to pay for this and then we can deploy their web servers onto this!

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