NEWS BRIEFS
Mountain View, CA — SGI announced that it will be receiving significant financial development support for the company’s Cray SV2 supercomputer system from several U.S. government agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA). The Cray SV2 system, currently in development, will dramatically extend the capability of supercomputers. Specifically designed to meet the needs of the high-end user, SGI’s Cray SV2 will provide exceptional memory bandwidth, interconnections and vector-processing capabilities.
“The United States is committed to maintaining and building on its long-held position as the global leader in supercomputing,” said George Cotter, chief scientist, NSA. “These powerful computers are absolutely essential to U.S. national security interests. To that end, the U.S. government is committing significant support to SGI’s Cray SV2 program.”
“The government support reflects a continuing need for government-industry cooperative development of critical technologies for high-end computing,” said Cotter. “The SV2 will include technology jointly developed with the U.S. government. This will considerably extend the combination of custom-designed high-end processors with the high-speed memory access that current Cray supercomputers offer.”
In addition to critical government applications, the Cray SV2 supercomputer will contribute to advances in areas such as automotive design, aerospace engineering, weather and climate prediction, and academic research. The supercomputer will feature powerful vector processors while exploiting SGI’s ccNUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory access) architecture. Plans call for the system to scale to peak performances of multiple tens of teraflops, many times faster than any supercomputer in existence today. One teraflop is equivalent to a trillion calculations per second.
“U.S. government support for SGI’s Cray SV2 program underscores the critical importance of the next generation of Cray supercomputers,” said John R. “Beau” Vrolyk, senior vice president, Product Group, SGI. “SGI is also making a substantial R&D investment in the development of this system and is committed to maintaining global leadership in this class of technologies and systems.”
For additional information visit http://www.sgi.com
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