New Cray super computer uses 30,000 Opterons

According to the press release, the XT4 designed to easily and efficiently scale to a peak performance of more than one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second). Evolved from the Cray XT3 supercomputer, the Cray XT infrastructure provides a common, scalable environment for login, compilation, resource management, work scheduling and I/O. This environment also includes a unique globally shared, high-performance parallel file system, as well as network interfaces to other systems.

Now this is a lot of power! I’d hate to be the one to pay this power bill. You may wonder why they use 30,000 Opterons instead of 15,000 Core 2 Duo’s. Well, that’s a great question but likely has to do with how the Opteron can handle interconnects. I’d assume that Cray knows what they are doing.