Cray is adding an AMD processor option to its CS500 line of clustered supercomputers.

The CS500 supports more than 11,000 nodes which can use Intel Xeon SP CPUs, optionally accelerated by Nvidia Tesla GPUs or Intel Phi co-processors. Intel Stratix FPGA acceleration is also supported.

There can be up to 72 nodes in a rack, interconnected by EDR/FDR InfiniBand or Intel's OmniPath fabric.

Cray has now added an AMD Epyc 7000 option to the CPU mix:

Systems provide four dual-socket nodes in a 2U chassis

Each node supports two PCIe 3.0 x 16 slots (200Gb network capability) and HDD/SSD options

Epyc 7000 processors support up to 32 cores and eight DDR4 memory channels per socket

Cray CS500

The CS500 line will also include a 2U chassis with a single two-socket node for large memory configurations, visualisation, and service node functionality to complement the compute node form factor.

The company said its Cray Programming Environment and libraries work with and even enhance AMD Epyc processor performance.

Scott Aylor, AMD's VP and GM for data centre and embedded solutions, claimed: "Cray is the first system vendor to offer an optimised programming environment for AMD Epyc processors, which is a distinct advantage."

Epyc-based CS500s will ship in the summer. ®