Cray Inc. Wins DOE Contracts at NERSC and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

By DE Editors

Cray Inc. has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The multi-year supercomputing contract includes delivery of a Cray XT5 massively parallel processor supercomputer, which will be upgraded to a future-generation Cray supercomputer. When completed, the new Cray will deliver a peak performance of more than one petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second).

Like NERSC’s current 355-teraflops Cray XT4 system, nicknamed “Franklin,” the new supercomputing system will help advance open science research in climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets. 

“As NERSC is the primary supercomputing center for DOE’s Office of Science, making Cray’s latest technology available to our users will accelerate innovation across a wide range of scientific disciplines, helping scientists tackle problems of vital importance to our nation’s future,” said Michael Strayer, associate director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at more than $50 million. The full system is expected to go into production in late 2010.

Cray Inc. has also received a contract from the DOE to upgrade the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The upgrade to Six-Core AMD Opteron processors, code-named “Istanbul,” will increase Jaguar’s peak performance to more than two petaflops of compute power, solidifying its position as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, according to the company.

The contract to upgrade the Jaguar system will increase the number of the Cray XT5 supercomputer’s processing cores to more than 224,000. The upgrade is expected to be installed and accepted by the end of 2009.

For more information, visit Cray, Inc.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.