Custom Engineering

Cray offers Custom Engineering solutions to government agencies, commercial customers, and systems integrators to address high performance computing requirements not met through standard products. Cray leverages extensive knowledge and intellectual property relating to supercomputer system design to provide a full suite of unique and leading-edge solutions, including:

Consulting in HPC system architectures, including vector, multi-threaded, scalar, FPGA and hybrid systems.
Design, development and implementation of system software, such as operating systems, hardware supervisory systems, programming environment and compilers.
Design and production of system hardware, including cabinet design, power & cooling and printed circuit board design.
End-to-end system implementation, system prototyping, manufacturing, and site integration.

Cray Custom Engineering offerings leverage the innovation and technology gained from more than 25 years of designing cutting-edge supercomputers, with projects staffed by engineers and developers who have the experience and expertise to meet each customer’s unique technical needs. Cray Custom Engineering leverages Cray’s established product development processes, and projects are led by experienced program managers who ensure projects meet technical, schedule, and budget requirements.

Cray Custom Engineering services spring from years of design, development, manufacturing and support of high performance computing systems and technologies. Some examples of Cray custom development technologies include:

Intercooling: A cooling technology that uses evaporative phase-changes to efficiently remove, in a self-regulated fashion, large amounts of heat from an air flow. The system permits extreme processor densities (192 processors a two foot wide cabinet today) using intercoolers between chassis that can remove over 70KW per cabinet without increasing ambient room temperature.

Packaging: A hierarchy of packaging technologies that spans chips, compute blades, router cards, chassis enclosures and cabinets – with integrated power and cooling technologies.

Power Management: Hardware and software Power Aware Design (PAD) strategies to reduce and manage the overall system power without adversely affecting system performance.

The Hardware Supervisory System (HSS): An independent system of microprocessors on a dedicated network that manages system power and monitors the system environment. HSS includes cabinet controllers, blade controllers and numerous sensor microcontrollers. Most of the management controllers are based on a common, single-board-computer (SBC) design and run embedded Linux.

Vector and Multithreaded Processors: Alternative processing architectures (as opposed to x86 scalar processors) capable of delivering tremendous performance advantages across a number of applications. Cray pioneered vector technology over 30 years ago and began pioneering multithreading technology nearly 20 years ago.

High-radix Routers: A router architecture capable of scaling to large numbers of ports with flexible routing, providing a number of advanced performance and reliability features, such as automatic load balancing and automatic link degradation in the face of hard lane faults.

Hybrid Networks: A flexible set of network building blocks, based on the high-radix router architecture, that allow varied network topologies, with different cost and performance trade-offs and interoperability between multiple compute blades and network generations.

dpFBAdvanced Signaling Technology: High-speed, low power, area-efficient SerDes signaling technology allowing hundreds of bidirectional, 20 Gbps communications lanes per ASIC.

Optics: 16-way 20 Gbps/wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical technology providing 320 Gbps per fiber, which allows our 20 Gbps signals to be carried over distances of multiple meters.