Cray Wins $52 Million Supercomputer Contract

The Interfacer writes "Cray and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announced that Cray has won the contract to install a next-generation supercomputer at the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The systems and multi-year services contract, valued at over $52 million, includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named 'Hood.'"

Comments

Cray "getting it" might let them come back.

[Jerk City Troll]

Cray finally figured it out. I have been saying for years: HPC/Beowulf clusters are about building machines around problems

That is why Clusters are such a powerful paradigm. If your problem needs more processors/memory/bandwidth/data access, you can design a cluster to fit your problem and only buy what your need. In the past you had to buy a large supercomputer with lots of engineering you did not need. Designing clusters is an art, but the payoff is very good price-to-performance. A good article on this topic is the Cluster Urban Legends, which explains many of these issues.

good to see...

[Connie_Lingus]

the Cray brand making a comeback in the super-computer area. I can remember fondly the days of my engineer CS days longing looking at those Cray supercomputers (was that a couch around it?!? COOL!) in awe and just wondering what they could possibly be computing with 512M of RAM and a 2G super-cooled processor. SUPER COOLED!

Then it was back to my PDP-11 ...reality bit.

Re:Who else bid?

[Kadin2048]

That was my first reaction: somebody at IBM is in deep shit.

It seems like they had a lock on the last few big DoE supers (and supercomputer sales in general); now all of a sudden we see Cray getting back in there. I wonder if IBM stepped on somebody's toes and got given the boot on this one (it's small, maybe this is just a spanking), or if they've gotten behind in the research and power/dollar worlds because they were doing so well for so long? Or is this just the government trying to spread the love around, giving a small project to somebody else for a change?

Reminds me a little of the whole Thinking Machines business a few years ago; they were the real darlings of the govt.-contract world, and then Cray and IBM started to get upset that TM was eating out of their rice bowl and lobbied Congress to even things out. Given that they're not around anymore, I think we can all figure how how that went.

Re:Just enough for them to limp along...

[afidel]

Nope, the NSA's budget is almost entirely black (covert). In fact one senator quipped after the NSA headquarters building was built that they spent x billion and had no clue on what.