SEATTLE, Wash.—Cray will take over from IBM the project to build a
supercomputer at the University of Illinois, the second significant
federally funded project to feature the system maker’s technology.
Cray officials on Nov. 14 announced that the
company will build the supercomputer at the university’s National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) that will be installed
over the first three quarters of 2012. The supercomputer will form the
basis for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project, which
calls for building a system that will offer a sustained performance of
1 petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) and be
used for a variety of research and engineering workloads.
The supercomputer will comprise a Cray XE6 system and the company’s new XK6 hybrid supercomputer,
which features Advanced Micro Devices new 16-core Operaton 6200
“Interlagos” processors and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) from
Nvidia. The system will offer the sustained performance of 1 petaflop
and a peak performance of 11.6 petaflops, according to Cray.
The announcement comes on the opening day of the
SC 11 supercomputing show here, which is expected to draw some 10,000
attendees.
Cray came into the picture after IBM, which
originally was contracted to build a petaflop-level supercomputer at
the institution, backed out over disagreements concerning the cost and
demands of the project. Cray officials said the multi-year contract is
worth $188 million.
Cray’s announcement comes a month after officials
announced the company had been awarded a $97 million contract to
upgrade the massive Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in Tennessee. The upgraded system, which will be known as Titan, will also include the hybrid CPU-GPU XK6, which Cray introduced in May.
Titan is expected to offer a peak performance of
10 to 20 petaflops, which would exceed Japan’s Fujitsu-built K
Computer, which in June hit number-one on the Top500 list of the
world’s most powerful supercomputer with a peak performance of 8.8
petaflops. The system retained its position at the top Nov. 14, when
the latest Top500 list showed the K Computer—running at the Riken
institute in Kobe, Japan—hitting a peak performance of 10.51 petaflops.
That system is powered by Fujitsu’s own SPARC64 IXfx chips, and does not use any graphics accelerators.
Both the Blue Waters and the Titan projects are
proof points of Cray’s direction, according to company President and
CEO Peter Ungaro.
"We're very excited to have been selected by the
NCSA, NSF and the University of Illinois to deliver the Blue Waters
system, which represents one of the largest contracts in our company's
history," Ungaro said in a statement. "Together with the recently
announced $97 million contract to upgrade the 'Jaguar' system at Oak
Ridge National Laboratories, these contracts demonstrate Cray's
leadership position in supercomputing.”
As part of the Blue Waters announcement, Cray
officials rolled out their fiscal outlook for 2012, which includes
revenues in the range of $340 million to $360 million, of which the
Blue Waters project will contribute about 40 percent.
The Blue Waters supercomputer will include 49,000
AMD as well as Nvidia’s next-generation “Kepler” Tesla GPU, which is
expected to double the performance of Nvidia’s Fermi GPU. There will be
more than 235 XE6 cabinets from Cray and more than 30 cabinets of the
XK6 systems.
The supercomputer will offer 1.5 petabytes of
total memory, Cray’s scalable CLE Linux environment and
high-performance computing (HPC)-focused GPU/CPU Programming
Environment. Cray also will include its integrated Lustre parallel file
system which will offer more than 25 petabytes of storage, and up to
500 petabytes of near-line storage and 300 gigabits per second of
wide-area connections.
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