Monday, April 05, 2010

Cray to Provide Petaflop System to LANL/NNSA Labs


Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that it has signed a sub-contract with Los Alamos National Security, LLC to provide the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with a next-generation Cray supercomputer. Currently valued at more than $45 million, the multi-year, multi-phase contract can be expanded if the NNSA exercises an option for a future upgrade. The new system will create a new supercomputing platform, named Cielo, for the Advanced Simulation and Computing program at the NNSA.

The Cielo platform will support all three of the NNSA national laboratories, which include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The NNSA will use the new supercomputing system to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear stockpile, and will run the NNSA's largest and most demanding modeling and simulation workload.

"Cielo is being acquired and deployed by the NNSA's New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scales (ACES). This is a joint partnership between Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. Both Los Alamos and Sandia have a long history with Cray, going back to the very beginning of the supercomputing era," said John Morrison, High Performance Computing Division Leader at Los Alamos. "With the Cielo platform, that history continues with the next generation of capability computing in support of the U.S. nuclear security enterprise."

"Cielo is the culmination of a two year partnership between Sandia and LANL on ACES," said Sudip Dosanjh, Sandia co-director for ACES. "We look forward to working with Cray to create an order of magnitude increase in capability for key NNSA national security applications. Cielo will target extremely large problems that require production, petascale supercomputing."

"The NNSA plays a critical role in protecting the safety and security of our country, and we are quite proud that some of the organization's most critical scientific research will be done on a Cray supercomputer," said Peter Ungaro, Cray president and CEO. "We have had a great partnership with the NNSA including the development of Red Storm -- a collaboration that enabled the launch of our first Cray XT3 supercomputer. We are honored to be able to continue this important partnership and are encouraged that the NNSA laboratories share in the excitement around our next-generation 'Baker' supercomputer."

The next-generation Cray supercomputer will be housed at the Strategic Computing Complex at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is expected to be delivered in the second half of 2010. Code-named "Baker," Cray's new supercomputing system will feature a new interconnect chipset known as "Gemini" and enhanced system software that improves the performance, productivity and reliability of the system. Cray's planned "Baker" supercomputer builds on the Cray XT system architecture found in the world's fastest supercomputer and improves it in every key dimension.


no time to comment. I didn't even get a chance to work on the Medea post this weekend.

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