SEATTLE, WA -- 08/28/08 --
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today unveiled a revolutionary liquid cooling technology that will
allow computers to operate at unprecedented speeds of multiple petaflops
(thousands of trillions of calculations per second) while delivering
significant energy savings and installation flexibility. Cray XT5 systems
will begin shipping with the company's new ECOphlex (PHase-change Liquid
EXchange) technology later this year.
Cray has been a leader in power and cooling technologies, including liquid
cooling, since the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976. The new ECOphlex
technology promotes energy savings by enabling greater system density,
reducing the need for expensive air cooling and air conditioners, and
limiting the need for chilled water.
"IDC research shows that power and cooling efficiency, and system density,
are among the top concerns of high performance computing (HPC) buyers
today. Escalating system sizes and sharply rising energy costs are
contributing to these concerns," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice
president for HPC. "ECOphlex technology is designed to alleviate these
issues for high-end HPC users and could be an important differentiator for
Cray as they prepare to enter the petascale computing era."
"Most large computers today exhaust heat into the air, and then the
Computer Room Air Conditioner [CRAC] units have to remove the heat from the
air and put it into chilled water. This method is very inefficient. For a
petascale system, the area taken up by the CRAC units could exceed the
computer footprint, wasting precious datacenter space and energy," said
Cray Chief Technology Officer Steve Scott. "Other systems use chilled
water coils embedded in each computer cabinet and sometimes even embedded
invasively into the compute blades. With ECOphlex technology, you still use
chilled water, but much less of it. And because of our unique engineering,
you don't need to worry about water condensation or leakage that could harm
electronic components. The combination of our ECOphlex technology,
unprecedented upgradeability and environmentally-friendly design
philosophy, makes Cray systems the industry-leading 'green' solution."
The ECOphlex technology is designed to be "room air neutral," meaning that
the temperature of the air entering the system is roughly the same as the
temperature of the air exiting the system. In a recent test at a
government site, ECOphlex technology removed 100% of the heat.
Cray's new high-efficiency cabinet with ECOphlex technology has the
flexibility to use either the company's high-efficiency vertical air
cooling or the new liquid evaporative phase-change cooling technology that
converts an inert coolant, R134a, from a liquid to a gas. Systems with the
ECOphlex technology also have the flexibility to use chilled or unchilled
water at various temperatures, reducing the need for many CRAC units. The
technology's phase change coil is more than 10 times as efficient at
removing heat from the compute cabinets as a water coil of similar size.
According to Scott, "Attempts to improve energy efficiency often involve
lower-power processors or reducing the frequencies of standard processors.
But this requires more processors to achieve a given performance level,
which reduces performance efficiency. And since many application codes have
limited scalability, this strategy can reduce an HPC system's
breadth-of-applicability, making it a more limited-purpose machine.
ECOphlex technology allows HPC sites, large or small, to enter the
muli-petaflops era, tackle the most daunting science and engineering
problems, and apply large numbers of high-performance processors at
industry-leading densities while achieving strong energy efficiencies on a
broad spectrum of applications."
"In addition to its cooling technologies, Cray continues to provide
environmentally friendly, multi-generational cabinets to our customers,
most of whom have already upgraded two or three times in the same cabinets
for a dramatic TCO advantage," said Ian Miller, senior vice president of
sales and marketing at Cray. "All too often, buying the next-generation
supercomputer from a vendor requires a forklift upgrade replacement of the
cabinets. The HPC buyer bears the substantial added cost of the new
cabinets, and the 'old' cabinets often have to be trucked off at some cost
to a landfill, with a negative environmental impact."
About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced
supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry
and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve
remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency
and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's
Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation
products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified
architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting
the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com
for more information.
Cray is a registered trademark, and ECOphlex, Cray XT5, and Cray-1 are
trademarks of Cray Inc.
Cray Media:
Steve Conway
651/592-7441
sttico@aol.com
Cray Investors:
Paul Hiemstra
206/701-2044
ir@cray.com
