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HPCwire >> Topic >> Systems

April 04, 2008

Near-Petaflop Supercomputer Headed to Tennessee

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National Science Foundation's supercomputing initiative facilitates delivery and operation of powerful next-generation Cray MPP system

SEATTLE, April 3 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced it will provide the University of Tennessee with a next-generation massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer to advance science in a number of areas including global climate change research, natural disaster modeling and understanding the complexities of the human brain. At just under one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) of peak performance, the system will be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, with unmatched sustained performance.

The University of Tennessee was selected as the Track 2 award recipient of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) High Performance Computing (HPC) computing initiative to enable petascale science and engineering through world-class supercomputing. As part of the multi-phase Track 2 award, Cray will provide the University of Tennessee with a highly scalable Cray XT4 supercomputer that incorporates new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors this year and then upgrade the system to near-petaflops compute capability in 2009. Designed for sustained application performance, scalability, and reliability, the system will be housed at the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Institute for Computational Sciences.

"It is critical that the academic community have access to industry-leading computing resources, allowing researchers to address the most computationally-challenging problems in science," said Thomas Zacharia, both University of Tennessee vice president for science and technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory associate director for computing and computational sciences. "This award by the NSF will provide our researchers with the computational power, scalability and upgradeability required to advance science in a broad range of key disciplines."

The new system will be used to advance science in a number of areas including:

  • Providing a boost to climate scientists in their efforts to predict extreme weather such as hurricanes and tornadoes as well as long-term climate changes and the effects of pollution.

  • Permitting astrophysicists to conduct more realistic simulations of supernova formation, galaxy evolution, and black hole mergers.

  • Enabling earth scientists to perform high-resolution simulations of the Earth's interior and enhance our understanding of the planet's evolution.

"The University of Tennessee is a rapidly growing research institution and we value this opportunity to partner with them to support their commitment to breakthrough science," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "This system will enable researchers to work on the biggest, most complex science and engineering applications, solving larger problems faster and running more accurate simulations. We want to thank the NSF for recognizing the importance of HPC in achieving the scientific breakthroughs that advance society and impact our everyday lives."

About the Cray XT4 Supercomputer

Building on the success of the Cray XT3 system, the Cray XT4 system is an 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 to more than 120,000 processor cores with exceptional sustained performance. The system's scalable processing element uses x86 64-bit AMD Opteron 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.

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