Swift Engineering, a California race-car maker was first to buy Cray's new supercomputer

Maker of high-performance computing systems Cray has launched the next series of its famous Cray supercomputers. The CX1000 features a hybrid supercomputing architecture, based on Intel's next-generation Xeon processors, which the chipmaker formally launched last week.

Price of the new Cray, available in one to four chassis in a stand-alone cabinet, starts at around $100,000. There are there possible configurations: C, G and S. The rack-mountable system is configurable with Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 and Linux.

The compute-based Cray CX1000-C features the dual-socket Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series for scale-out cluster computing; the Cray CX1000-G carries the NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for accelerator-based HPC and the Cray CX1000-S provides symmetric multiprocessing nodes for up to 128 cores of "big memory" computing, built on Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology.

The first customer to buy one of the new systems is Swift Engineering, a California open-wheel race-car maker. The company will use the machine for computational fluid dynamics, a tool used for development of aerodynamics concepts. Swift is aiming to build the next generation race-car chassis for the 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series - a US open-wheel racing league.

"The decision to use Cray supercomputers was the result of a focused effort to find the right resources to meet our significant and demanding design challenges," Swift President Jan Wesley said in a statement.

"Expanding our total addressable market is an important strategic goal for the company," Cray SVP of Productivity Solutions Group and Marketing Ian Miller said in a statement. "From petascale technologies to deskside supercomputing systems using either CPUs or GPUs, we now provide a supercomputing solution for virtually any supercomputing need."