[geeks] the biggest, baddest workstation...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:14:38PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> Robert Brooke Gravitt wrote:
>> On May 15, 2009, at 9:11 PM, Micah R Ledbetter wrote:
>>
>>> <http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx> ?
>>>
>>> :)
>>>
>>> - Micah
>>
>> Um.... What? That's just.... Weird. Windows? On a Cray?
>
> Isn't that machine not a shared-memory system?  Isn't basically a bunch of 
> blades systems in a deskside chassis?

Yep.  And I don't even see any references to exotic interconnects
between the blades (no SeaStar, which wouldn't work with the sorts of
Xeon's that the CX-1 uses anyway).  The Wikipedia page mentions that
Infiniband is an option, but I can't find that on the Cray web page.

I do see evinence of the compute blades using a regular OS instead of
Catamount or CNL though.  Also, itdoesn't appear that they accept the X2
blades (vector processor blades) or XR1 blades (An Opteron and a FPGA
talking).  

In short, the only interesting thing about the box is the cray name and
the active noise cancelling system (which is only an option anyway).

A blade chassis for the XT5h shrunk down to desk side dimensions would
have been much more interesting, presuming that it could be done.

Ooh, I just noticed on Wikipedia that there is now a Cray XMT.  This
takes the processors from the MTA2 and makes them Socket F compatible
so that large MTA's can be build using XT4 chassis.  I'd love to see a
hybrid MTA/Opteron/FPGA/Vector machine.