Oak Ridge National Laboratory To Deploy New Supercomputer

By DE Editors

Cray Inc. has signed a contract to upgrade the Cray XT5 supercomputer at the Department of Energys (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to a new Cray XK6 supercomputer (Titan). When completed, the Titan system will have a peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of high performance computing (HPC) power. The Titan will be more than two times faster and three times more energy efficient than todays fastest supercomputer, the K computer located in Japan.

The system will be used for research in a broad range of fields,  including material science, energy technology, medical research,  geoscience, and others.

The multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $97 million. The first phase (expected to conclude this year) will include replacing the Cray XT5 compute blades with Cray XK6 compute blades,  which will feature the upcoming AMD Opteron processors, Crays Gemini interconnect, and a subset of Cray XK6 nodes equipped with NVIDIA  Tesla 20-series GPUs. The second phase of the contract (equipping the system with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation architecture) will be completed in the second half of 2012.
 
For more information, visit Cray and NVIDIA.

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