The Jim Austin Computer Collection

Cray XD1

This is a Cray XD1 from Manchester computer centre in Feb 2011. The machine is made up of six opteron based machines with high speed interconnect. The unusual feature is the inclusion of FPGA devices (reprogammable hardware), to allow application specific hardaware to be programmed.

The system is a 6 chassis Cray XD1. Each chassis comprises of six nodes, where a node is a dual processor AMD Opteron 250 with a clock speed of 2.4GHz and 4GB local memory, all connected by Cray’s proprietary RapidArray fabric. Thus the machine has 72 processors and 144Gb of main memory. Three of the XD1 chassis are equipped with FPGAs. In total there are twelve Xilinx Virtex 4 (LX160) FPGAs and six Xilinx Virtex 2 Pro FPGAs attached to the system.