Cray XD1

The XD1 uses AMD Opteron 64-bit CPUs, and utilizes the Direct Connect Architecture over HyperTransport to remove the bottleneck at the PCI and contention at the memory.

The MPI latency is ¼ that of Infiniband, and 1/30 that of Gigabit Ethernet.

The XD1 was originally designed by OctigaBay Systems Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada as the OctigaBay 12K system.

Announced on 4 October 2004, the Cray XD1 range incorporate Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs for application acceleration.

The operating system used on the XD1 is a customized version of Linux, and the machine's load balancing / resource management system is an enhanced version of Sun Microsystems' Sun Grid Engine.