Cray and Intel Hook Up for Future Supercomputers

Published: April 29, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The amount of money at stake is not huge, and the number of processors involved will not be anything close to the kind of volume shipments that general purpose servers account for. But this week's announcement by supercomputer maker Cray that it had formed a multi-year technology development agreement with Intel is something of an embarrassment to Advanced Micro Devices--as much as Cray's original partnership with AMD back in June 2002 for the $90 million "Red Storm" supercomputer was an embarrassment to Intel.

Six years ago, you will recall, Intel was stubbornly sticking to its chip roadmaps. Intel put Itaniums on the 64-bit highway and kept Xeons on the 32-bit backroads as an artificial means to try to prop up the Itaniums and give the processors--a very clean, elegant design, to be sure--a reason to be. And even after AMD had shown that it made more sense to extend the X86 architecture to 64 bits and evolve from a front side bus architecture to the point-to-point CPU, cache, and main memory interconnect exemplified by AMD's HyperTransport, AMD stuck to its guns, mumbling about its plans to deliver multicore processors at some point in the future.

What a difference six years makes, right? AMD slipped a bit with the delivery of dual-core "Santa Rosa" Rev F Opterons and slipped a lot, thanks in part to a cache bug, with the quad-core "Barcelona" Rev F chips, which should have been shipping last June when the market was ready and waiting for them and which are just now starting to appear in machines. Intel has embraced 64-bit Xeon designs, got multicore chips out the door with quick and dirty dual-chip packaging, and anointed its laptop chips as the Core architecture and drove up cores and caches to drive performance. Not only that, but the company is working on embedded main memory controllers for future Xeons and a QuickPath Interconnect that is for all intents and purposes a functional equivalent to HyperTransport and which will support Xeon and Itanium chips equally well. Intel has, to add insult to injury, inked a partnership with Sun Microsystems for its "Galaxy" X64 server line--a product that was geared for Opterons until AMD started to slow the pace of innovation and experience delays. And perhaps most ominously, Intel is using its ability to crank up chip-making processes at high volume to put technical and economic pressure on AMD. Intel is cranking up 45 nanometer chips at the same time that AMD is ramping up 65 nanometer chips.

In 2000, if you were backing an X64 horse for long-term supercomputer design--and in the high performance computing arena, the roadmaps that get nailed down stretch across a decade--you would have picked AMD, not Intel. Today, even though Opterons are very technically elegant, AMD's financial woes in the wake of its acquisition of ATI Technologies, the Rev F delays, and a resurgent Intel make it harder for companies like Cray to simply back AMD. It doesn't help that Cray has had a few quarters go bad because of the Opteron delays, either.

The details are a little thin about the partnership between Intel and Cray, but Richard Dracott, general manager of Intel's High Performance Systems division, which was created a year and a half ago to boost Intel's presence in supercomputing and to blunt the attack by AMD, was pleased by the deal even if he was not particularly talkative about what it meant. Dracott was not at liberty to talk about the financial details of the partnership between Intel and Cray, what Intel products would be used where, or even what the length of the arrangement would be between the two companies other than to say it was a "multiyear agreement."

Ian Miller, vice president of sales and marketing at Cray, who did interviews in conjunction with Dracott on the deal, said that Cray was very excited about the new relationship with Intel, and added that the two companies would be able to bring technologies to market in the 2011 or 2012 timeframe, when the "Cascades" line of petascale-class supercomputers are expected from Cray. Miller did say that Cray has licensed Intel's QuickPath Interconnect, which is the key technology since what makes Red Storm and all of its successors in the XT line of parallel supercomputers work is the SeaStar interconnect chip developed by Cray that links into HyperTransport to create a parallel cluster. Having hooked into HyperTransport point-to-point interconnects, hooking into similar QuickPath Interconnect technology should be relatively easy. "For our customers, this will result in a smooth transition as we move forward," explained Miller. As for whether or not Cray was dropping Opterons and moving exclusively to Xeons, Miller would not say. "We are evaluating how we do this. Today is not about specific roadmaps and deliverables," he said.

That language might lead one to believe that Cray does indeed intend to pick Intel as its new X64 horse and run with it. Don't you believe it. The architecture of the Cascades machines allows many different kinds of chips--multicore vector processors created by Cray, MTA-2 multithreaded chips, Opterons, and field programmable gate arrays--to co-exist inside a shared memory system. Adding a variant that does QuickPath Interconnect instead of HyperTransport is one option, and it could even turn out that AMD and Intel converge their chip designs to a single point-to-point interconnect and chip socket in the future. (Stranger things have happened, and this would obviously be good for server makers as well as customers.)

Cray has to walk a fine line with the Intel deal because, as a public company, it cannot spook investors or current and prospective customers that it doesn't have faith in the Opterons upon which it is very much dependent. But it wants customers and investors to also know that it is working with Intel now and getting a long-term roadmap together. Having been burned by processor delays a number of times in its long history--the Opteron issue is but one--you can bet that Cray very much wants to have dual sourcing for the X64 chips that are the key component in its Linux supercomputers. And you can also bet that this time around, Cray will want as many common technologies as it and the rest of the server industry can compel Intel and AMD to deliver in the years ahead.

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