NCSA, Cray Partner on Sustained-Petascale Blue Waters Supercomputer

By DE Editors

The University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has finalized a contract with Cray Inc. to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project.

This new Cray supercomputer will support research advances in a broad range of science and engineering domains, meeting the needs of the most compute-intensive, memory-intensive, and data-intensive applications. Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance, on average, of more than one petaflop on a set of benchmark codes that represent those applications and domains.

Blue Waters will be composed of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets based on the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor (formerly code-named “Interlagos”) and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing capability incorporated into a single, hybrid supercomputer. 

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year and multi-phase contract is valued at more than $188 million. Cray will begin installing hardware in the University of Illinois’ National Petascale Computing Facility soon, with an early science system expected to be available in spring 2012. Blue Waters is expected to be fully deployed by the end of 2012.

For more supercomputing news from SC11, visit Engineering on the Edge.

For more information, visit the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Cray.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.