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Cray Replaces IBM To Build $188M Supercomputer
wiredmikey writes "Supercomputer maker Cray today said that the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) awarded the company a contract to build a supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. The supercomputer will be powered by new 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named 'Interlagos') a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA, called 'Kepler,' and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. IBM was originally selected to build the supercomputer in 2007, but terminated the contract in August 2011, saying the project was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support beyond its original expectations. Once fully deployed, the system is expected to have a sustained performance of more than one petaflops on demanding scientific applications."
Designing supercomputers involves a lot of investment in inter-CPU messaging and memory sharing. Once a supercomputer-vendor has committed themselves to a platform, it's not easy to migrate to another. Given the volumes they sell, design costs will have to be spread on just a few actual installations. Maybe AMD was the best platform to use when these computers were originally designed, but they are outdated now. The fact that these new AMD CPUs will work in "ancient" sockets and use the same interconnects, will make development cost for a performance upgrade lower.
Obligatory car metaphore: Most car manufacturers put old technology in cars they bring out today as well, just because the cost of developing new technology and building production lines is commercially prohibitive.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The supercomputers in Jurassic Park were Thinking Machines systems, not Crays.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
The Cray name was bought from SGI by Tera. SGI was later bought by Rackable.
It is true that it costs a lot to switch processors, but lets remember that HPC systems are also very price sensitive. Blue waters will have more than 50,000 processor sockets in it. Xeon processors may be better than opterons, but they also cost a LOT more. Multiply that by 50,000. In the benchmarks I've seen, 16 core opterons almost compete with 8 core xeons in raw performance, but blow the xeons away in price/performance.