anzha's Journal: Cray Wins $52 Million Supercomputer Contract w/NERSC

Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced today that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named "Hood."

The contract also provides options for future upgrades that would quadruple the size of the system and eventually boost performance to one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) and beyond.

A successor to the massively parallel Cray XT3(TM) supercomputer, the Hood system installed at NERSC will be among the world's fastest general-purpose systems. It will deliver sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second -- with a theoretical peak speed of 100 trillion calculations per second -- when running a suite of diverse scientific applications at scale. The system uses thousands of AMD Opteron(TM) processors running tuned, light-weight operating system kernels and interfaced to Cray's unique SeaStar(TM) network.

Cray will begin shipping the new supercomputer to the NERSC facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory later this year, with completion of the installation anticipated in the first half of 2007 and acceptance in mid-2007.

Read about it here.