HPCwire: Cray Supercomputer at ORNL Upgraded to 119 Teraflops

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April 13, 2007

Cray Supercomputer at ORNL Upgraded to 119 Teraflops

SEATTLE, Wash., April 11 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has completed a more than doubling of the capacity of its Cray supercomputer. The ORNL system, which was already the world's most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research at 54 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), now has a performance capacity of 119 teraflops. The upgrade is an important milestone in ORNL's previously announced plan to provide its users with a petaflops-speed supercomputer (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) in 2008.

Scientists and industry partners such as Boeing, Corning, DreamWorks Animation and General Atomics will be able to employ the enhanced Cray supercomputer configuration to conduct high-impact projects as part of the Department of Energy's INCITE program. In addition, ORNL staff and guest researchers will use the Cray supercomputer to advance the frontiers of neutron science, biological systems, energy production and advanced materials.

ORNL enhanced its existing Cray XT3 supercomputer and integrated it with a new, fully compatible Cray XT4 system. The merged supercomputer has a total of 11,708 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 46 terabytes of memory and 750 terabytes of disk storage. The Cray XT4 supercomputer can be upgraded to AMD's quad-core processing technology in the future.

The system is housed in ORNL's National Leadership Computing Facility, which is part of the DOE Office of Science's 20-year plan to provide facilities needed to extend the frontiers of science, to pursue opportunities of enormous importance and to maintain U.S. science primacy in the world. The supercomputer at ORNL will be open to the scientific community for research.

"The Cray XT4 system upgrade is a major milestone in our continuing partnership with Cray and for our plan to a build up in stages to a petaflops system," said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "The new Cray XT4 system will perform significantly faster on a broad spectrum of important scientific applications, allowing our users to further extend the bounds of possibility. We are already sustained performance in the range of 36 to 68 percent of peak on a variety of important applications that will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery."

"The Cray XT4 system builds upon our highly successful Cray XT3 supercomputer, providing unrivaled scalability, performance, and reliability in a leadership supercomputer that is capable of being expanded to more than a petaflops of peak performance," said Peter Ungaro, Cray president and CEO. "The innovative packaging of the Cray XT3 and Cray XT4 allow the systems to be upgraded, expanded, combined and integrated with future systems, providing our customers, like ORNL, with incredible flexibility and a great way to protect their investment for years to come."

About the Cray XT4 Supercomputer

Building on the success of the Cray XT3 system, the Cray XT4 is a massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer purpose-built to deliver exceptional sustained application performance for challenging scientific and engineering problems. The supercomputer's high-speed 3D torus interconnect, advanced MPP operating system and high-speed global input/output make it possible for users to scale applications from 200 to more than 30,000 processors without performance loss. The system's scalable processing element uses x86 64-bit AMD Opteron single- or dual-core processors that employ HyperTransport technology to increase bandwidth and reduce latency. Go to www.cray.com/products/xt4/index.html for more information.

About Cray Inc.

As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

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Source: Cray Inc.

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