Friday, April 20th 2018
Cray Debuts AMD EPYC Processors in Supercomputer Product Line
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced it has added AMD EPYC processors to its Cray CS500 product line. To meet the growing needs of high-performance computing (HPC), the combination of AMD EPYC 7000 processors with the Cray CS500 cluster systems offers Cray customers a flexible, high-density system tuned for their demanding environments. The powerful platform lets organizations tackle a broad range of HPC workloads without the need to rebuild and recompile their x86 applications.
"Cray's decision to offer the AMD EPYC processors in the Cray CS500 product line expands its market opportunities by offering buyers an important new choice," said Steve Conway, senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. "The AMD EPYC processors are expressly designed to provide highly scalable, energy- and cost-efficient performance in large and midrange clusters."
The Cray CS500 systems with AMD EPYC processors also come with Cray's software programing environment. Cray has integrated and optimized the Cray Programming Environment and libraries to enhance AMD EPYC processor performance.
"Our decision to offer AMD EPYC processors in our CS500 product line is emblematic of Cray's commitment to the community to deliver a comprehensive line of high-density systems with an optimized programing environment to deliver the required performance and scalability," said Fred Kohout, senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Cray.
"Cray's leadership in supercomputing is well known and AMD is thrilled to be working with them on the CS500 cluster system," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, datacenter and embedded solutions, AMD. "Cray is the first system vendor to offer an optimized programming environment for AMD EPYC processors, which is a distinct advantage. Combining AMD EPYC processors with Cray's supercomputing expertise opens new opportunities for both companies to grow."
The Cray CS500 cluster systems with AMD EPYC 7000 processors provide four dual-socket nodes in a 2U chassis, each node supporting two (2) PCIe Gen3 x 16 slots (200Gb network capability) and HDD/SSD options. AMD EPYC 7000 processors support up to 32 cores and eight DDR4 memory channels per socket. The CS500 line will also include a 2U chassis with one node for large memory configurations, visualization, and service node functionality to complement the compute node form factor.
The Cray CS500 system with AMD EPYC processors will be generally available in summer 2018.
For more information, please visit the Cray website at www.cray.com.
"Cray's decision to offer the AMD EPYC processors in the Cray CS500 product line expands its market opportunities by offering buyers an important new choice," said Steve Conway, senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. "The AMD EPYC processors are expressly designed to provide highly scalable, energy- and cost-efficient performance in large and midrange clusters."
"Our decision to offer AMD EPYC processors in our CS500 product line is emblematic of Cray's commitment to the community to deliver a comprehensive line of high-density systems with an optimized programing environment to deliver the required performance and scalability," said Fred Kohout, senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Cray.
"Cray's leadership in supercomputing is well known and AMD is thrilled to be working with them on the CS500 cluster system," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, datacenter and embedded solutions, AMD. "Cray is the first system vendor to offer an optimized programming environment for AMD EPYC processors, which is a distinct advantage. Combining AMD EPYC processors with Cray's supercomputing expertise opens new opportunities for both companies to grow."
The Cray CS500 cluster systems with AMD EPYC 7000 processors provide four dual-socket nodes in a 2U chassis, each node supporting two (2) PCIe Gen3 x 16 slots (200Gb network capability) and HDD/SSD options. AMD EPYC 7000 processors support up to 32 cores and eight DDR4 memory channels per socket. The CS500 line will also include a 2U chassis with one node for large memory configurations, visualization, and service node functionality to complement the compute node form factor.
The Cray CS500 system with AMD EPYC processors will be generally available in summer 2018.
For more information, please visit the Cray website at www.cray.com.
14 Comments on Cray Debuts AMD EPYC Processors in Supercomputer Product Line
lets say 10 nodes (what we fit in our racks with apu,network etc)
Each is 2P system vs 2p Intel system
80000 dollars less, more I/O, arguably better performance, Epyc is not like 8700K vs 2700X, Intel have no clock advantage on servers and 4 less cores Per cpu.
Lower latency but those use case scenarios are few in the use-case scenarios this will be used at.
12NM ryzen have shown to be superior to SKL-X in any metric pretty much at a given clock and more efficient.
Still, 80k dollars saved just by choosing Epyc over Xeons, with at the very least the same performance and features if not better, for 10 nodes seems almost unreal. Then again, AMD went with extremely competitive pricing.
AMD's selling point is: we're not substantially cheaper but we are cheaper (ram is largest cost).
We have same performance.
We have encrypted memory for virtual machines (GREAT feature)
We have more I/O.
Unless you're upgrading a cluster I don't see a reason to buy xeons.... Coffee lake is strong but skylake X is definitely not.