Cray has just built a machine with 1,500 cores, 6TB of DRAM, 38TB of SSD flash and 120TB of disk storage and named it after a Swedish weather girl from the 1990s.
Actually we are not sure if there is any link between Gladiators’ star Ulrika Jonsson and Crays’ latest supercomputer but she has not been in the news lately so we thought we would help her out.
Rather than a B list celebrity, the Ulrika XA is what is known as a single-platform entity, which mixes a range of analytic workloads that needed separate systems.
Cray said that its design has been optimised for compute and memory-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads.
Urika-XA as a turnkey, scale-out, analytics appliance and is designed for “extreme analytics” (hence XA) and described as a “pre-integrated, open platform for high-performance big data analytics”.
A single Urika-XA rack features 48 Intel Xeon compute nodes with an 800gig SSD per node, 200TB of SDD and disk storage using Sonexion 900 array, InfiniBand, Lustre parallel file system, HDFS-compatibility and POSIX compliance.
It is based around a SW stack with Cloudera Enterprise, Apache Spark, Cray Adaptive Runtime for Hadoop and Urika-XA management system.
The first buyer is the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab where ironically it will be looking at the impact of the weather.
The Cray says it’s coming from supercomputing land with “battle-hardened” technology which we would have thought should be “Gladiator hardened” and jolly useful when you are trying to have an affair with an English football coach without the tabloids finding out.
