Cray X2

The Cray X2 is a vector processing node for the Cray XT5h supercomputer, developed and sold by Cray Inc. and launched in 2007. Developed under the code name Black Widow, it was first expected to be a standalone supercomputer that would supersede the Cray X1 parallel vector machine, but it was finally launched as one of four processor blade options for the XT5h system. An X2 blade holds two nodes, each with four symmetric multiprocessing vector processors and 32 or 64 gigabytes of shared memory, and each node reaches a peak performance of more than 100 gigaflops. The processors are linked by a radix-64 fat-tree interconnect built on the YARC router chip, and the blades connect to the rest of the XT5h through its SeaStar2+ interconnect. Up to 256 X2 blades can be installed in one XT5h system, where the nodes share the UNICOS/lc operating system, the user environment and the storage subsystem as part of the Rainier project.