The America based supercomputer manufacturer Cray has unveiled two supercomputers, with their applications targeted to Artificial. In recent times, there has been a huge buzz in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Mixed reality and Automobile infotainment. Tech giants like Microsoft are coming up with Automobile infotainment and the GPU manufacturers like Nvidia, Cray are coming up with Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Recently, Microsoft has announced its latest technologies Mixed Reality and Connected Vesicles. Nvidia has announced its DGX-1 and HGX-1 for Artificial Intelligence applications.
It is now the turn of the super computer manufacturing company Cray. CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX are the two supercomputers unveiled by Cray. These supercomputers are designed to be powered by Nvidia's Pascal-based Tesla GPUs. Both these supercomputers use Intel Skylake Xeon processors.
“Customer demand for AI-capable infrastructure is growing quickly, and the introduction of our new CS-Storm systems will give our customers a powerful solution for tackling a broad range of deep learning and machine learning workloads at scale with the power of a Cray supercomputer,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “The exponential growth of data sizes, coupled with the need for faster time-to-solutions in AI, dictates the need for a highly-scalable and tuned infrastructure.”
It is still a question, why Cray has implemented these supercomputers with Pascal GPUs rather than the latest and highly capable Volta's architectures.
Here is the comparison between these two supercomputers.
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| Cray Supercomputer |
“Customer demand for AI-capable infrastructure is growing quickly, and the introduction of our new CS-Storm systems will give our customers a powerful solution for tackling a broad range of deep learning and machine learning workloads at scale with the power of a Cray supercomputer,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “The exponential growth of data sizes, coupled with the need for faster time-to-solutions in AI, dictates the need for a highly-scalable and tuned infrastructure.”
It is still a question, why Cray has implemented these supercomputers with Pascal GPUs rather than the latest and highly capable Volta's architectures.
Here is the comparison between these two supercomputers.
| CS-Storm 500GT | CS-Storm 500NX | |
| Processors | Two Intel Xeon Skylake processors | Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 family processors |
| Memory | Upto 2 TB DDR4 (16 x 28GB DIMMs) | Upto 3TB DDR4 (24 x 128GB DIMMs) |
| Accelerators | Upto 10 NVIDIA Tesla P40 or P100 PCIe GPU accelerators | Upto 8 NVIDIA Tesla P100 SXM2 GPU accelerators |
| Drive bays | 12 hot-swappable 2.5 inch drives | 16 hot-swappable 2.5 inch drives |
| Expansion slots | 12 PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots supporting multiple PCIe topologies and configuration options | 4 x 16 low profile , 2 x 8 PCIe 3.0 |
| Power supply | Four 2200W AC power supply | Four 2200W AC power supply |
| Power Input | 200-277VAC, 10A Max | 200-277VAC, 10A Max |
| Weight | Upto 76lbs | Upto 135Lbs |
