From the Editor | Main Blog Index
February 25, 2010
A week after closing the books on 2009, Cray is busy building its 2010 business. On Wednesday, the company announced it had nabbed a $45 million contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) to deliver three Baker-class supercomputers to the agency.
The three new supers are being procured for the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), and specifically for the US Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska; and the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. According to Cray's press release, the contract is the largest HPCMP award to a single vendor.
The supercomputers will be used to support R&D for new materials, fuels, armor and weapons systems -- what the US military sometimes euphemistically refers to as "product development." The systems will also be put to use in military planning, humanitarian missions and long-term weather forecasting.
The $45 million multi-year contract includes services as well as hardware. From that we can surmise that the three machines are almost certainly sub-petaflop-level supers (unless Cray gave them a really, really sweet deal). Nonetheless, this represents a significant win for the company, and gives Cray's upcoming Baker system a nice endorsement by an organization that has had plenty of experience with the supercomputing maker.
Four of the six DoD supercomputing centers already own Cray gear, including the US Army Research Laboratory (two XT5s), the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (one XT5), the Army's Engineer Research and Development Center (one Cray XT4), and the Navy's DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (one XT5). By adding the Air Force Research Lab in the new contract, that puts Cray machinery in five of the six DoD centers.
Whether Ungaro and company are able to book any of the $45 million in 2010 will depend upon getting the Baker systems launched on time. As we reported last week, the Bakers are due out in the third quarter of this year. According to Cray, the development of the next-generation XT system is currently on schedule.
Posted by Michael Feldman - February 25, 2010 @ 4:44 PM, Pacific Standard Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
During a conversation this week with Cray CEO, Peter Ungaro, we learned that the company has managed to extend its reach into the enterprise HPC market quite dramatically--at least in supercomputing business terms. With steady growth into these markets, however, the focus on hardware versus the software side of certain problems for such users is....
Read more...
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.