TAMPA, Fla., 13 Nov. 2006. During Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, Fla., Cray Inc. announced the availability of its next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) system, the Cray XT4 supercomputer.

The new supercomputer, previously code-amed "Hood," is designed to easily and efficiently scale to a peak performance of more than one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second). The Cray XT4 supercomputer debuts with several large system orders announced earlier this year from leading organizations, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC).

The new Cray XT4 system offers scalability, and AMD Opteron dual-core processors that can be upgraded to AMD's quad-core processing technology in the future to deliver balanced petaflops performance.

The Cray XT4 supercomputer is the first product in Cray's Rainier program, the initial phase of the company's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The Rainier program will integrate all of Cray's current processor technologies onto a common Cray XT infrastructure.

The Cray XT4 supercomputer uses up to 30,000 AMD Opteron dual-core processors running a highly scalable operating system and interfaced to the Cray SeaStar2 interconnect chip to provide scalability and performance. Each AMD Opteron processor in the Cray XT4 system is coupled with its own interconnect chip. Providing six links in three dimensions, the SeaStar2 chip uses its embedded routing capability to take advantage of HyperTransport technology and accelerate communications among the processors