Cray is a supercomputer company that makes computer boxes that, simply put, have absolutely staggering computational power. Interesting trivia: It was boxes made by Cray that rendered movies like Tron (yes, that long ago). Back then a Cray looked like this.
If you’ve got 25 grand you don’t mind parting with that would put 768 gigaflops in your house, you can buy a Cray CX1, pictured right. Bear in mind 25k is the starting price of this box. Eight nodes with 16 Intel Xeon processors on board. Yes, you read right, 16 processors.
So if you thought the 8-core Mac Pro had some decent power under the hood.. well.. um.. no. Not compared to this "baby" cray it doesn’t. 
The OS choices are Windows HPC Server 2008 or Linux.
[Source: Computerworld]
Just to clarify – $25,000 get’s you the box and a single CPU (two cores). If you want to build a ’super computer’ – then at least according to their website – you’ll be spending over $70,000 for 8 cores (two Zeon quad core CPUs). I just built a Zeon-based dual quad core video editing workstation (yes, 8 cores) and spent under $7,000.
I don’t know where you’re looking but putting in 8 cores with 2 Zeon quad-core procs doesn’t go anywhere near 70k on a Cray.
http://img220.imageshack.us/my.php?image=craycx1configurator1221kv3.png
Hmmm…I was referencing a memo that was circulating around the department – someone got something very wrong. That was the sticking point to the department not upgrading a few workstations for HDV for the local PBS affiliate and the editing labs.
My bad.
Of course, the software would have to be extremely multi-threaded to use all of those cores, right?