Back in April, Cray and Intel Corp. formed a partnership to “collaborate to develop future supercomputing technologies,” and now the first fruits of that partnership are showing:

Using Intel chips for the first time, Cray, a name with tradition in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC), have launched a “desktop” version of Cray supercomputer.

The new Cray CX1 is designed to be much, much smaller than the commonly known idea of room-spanning, multimillion dollar supercomputer. Not much larger than a desktop tower, the performance is of course lower, but then again so is the price, a realistic configuration going for about $25,000. The Cray CX1 sports a minimum of two, but up to sixteen Intel Xeon dual or quad-core processors, the CX1 enclosure holding up to eight blades; a blade being a circuit board which is in and of itself a self-sufficient computer.

The Cray CX1 is available for shipment with either Red Hat Linux, or Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, an operating system designed to scale to the potential thousands of processing cores found in a supercomputer and yet keep the supercomputing environment simple.

Microsoft representative Vince Mendillo comments on the partnership between them and Cray: "Windows HPC Server 2008, in combination with the Cray CX1 supercomputer, will provide outstanding sustained performance on applications. This combined solution will enable companies in various sectors to unify their Windows desktop and server workflows. Many Microsoft financial services customers, for example, want to unify back-office modeling and simulation with the work of front-office trading desks.”

‘Proper’ HPC supercomputers are used in various fields such as aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging, engineering and others. This new lightweight HPC from Cray has been designed for smaller businesses who need more processing power than afforded by desktops, but cannot afford purchasing their own servers or waiting for time on large grid networks.