Slashdot Mirror
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."
Along with the cray they are upgrading (#3 in the world now, will be #1 when complete) and the one lockheed martin ordered (3 days ago) this is the third supercomputer that was ordered in the last 3 weeks to use opterons (bulldozer 16 cores).
the cpu sucks so much that, it is exclusively dominating the SUPERcomputer market.
Read radical news here
Ever since reading Jurassic Park, I've always wanted a Cray supercomputer. No other super computer company had a hand in bringing dinosaurs back to life. Once you've resurrected dinosaurs I don't think that can be topped. I wonder if U of I is planning on doing any dinosaur resurrections with their new super computer.
Cray has several of the Top 10 supercomputers on earth, especially in the US. They're pretty nice to work with, too.
The Cray name was bought from SGI by Tera. SGI was later bought by Rackable.
No they bid on something but later the time and expense was more than they could make a decent profit. I'm sure they could do it, but they don't want to do it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Last time I was at the air and space museum in Washington DC I saw a Cray Supercompter http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?id=A19880565000 :)
I was extremely excited and tried to show my kids who only saw a very weird big computer thing. A new supercomputer built by Cray sounds like a great idea
It's worth noting that the "new Cray", while they obviously don't make the old vector processor systems that they did originally, makes a really nifty hybrid cluster/SSI (single system image) supercomputer that is notably different than most of what's on the market. Man, seeing articles like this makes me want to get back into HPC stuff. I'm making a bit more doing this corporate crap, but I really miss getting to play with the cutting edge stuff.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I've been working with an agency who contracted a large project to IBM a few years ago. The results have been ... unimpressive. The training was largely a waste of time, I don't believe they even understood their audience.
Better to see Cray, I think as IBM is shopping out a bit too much of their work to people who aren't up to it .. unless IBM has seen the light.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Strange. If IBM is dying, then why is Warren Buffett investing $10.7 billion in them? Perhaps he knows something that we don't know?
I would normally say, "This isn't your father's IBM", but with respect to Mr. Buffett's age, I'm not sure it is his father's IBM, either.
In the 60's and 70's IBM was the company to work for.
In the 80's they began cutting.
In the early 90's they were slashing. We were trying to buy an RS6000 and from week to week I didn't know who I was talking to as the people were exiting so fast. When I ran into difficulty with a security flaw I found myself talking to someone from IBM in Australia who had them send me a stack of tapes and no directions.
Since then I expect IBM has done what a lot of IT companies have done, shop out bits of the work, bring in a lot of green (cheap) workers and try to muddle through the project. I don't see IBM as the tiger they once were. I don't think any IT company is, come to that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As covered earlier here, IBM backed out of the contract because they thought they wouldn't be able to meet the performance requirements for existing codes. They were concerned about clock speeds (POWER7 runs at 4 GHz). POWER7 excels at single thread performance, but also in fat SMP nodes.
What NSCA ordered now is system that is pretty much the antipode to the original Blue Waters: the Bulldozer cores are sub-par at floating point performance, so they'll have to rely on the Kepler GPUs. Those GPUs are great, but to make them perform well, NSCA and U of I will have to rewrite ALL of their codes. Moving data from host RAM to the GPU RAM over slow PCIe links can be a major PITA, especially if your code isn't prepared for that.
Given the fact that codes in HPC tend to live much longer than the supercomputer they run on, I think it would have been cheaper for them to give IBM another load of cash and keep the POWER7 approach.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
They didn't just buy the name. They also bought all of the people who designed and built those earlier Cray machines. There are still people at Cray who had a hand in the original Cray 1. It's actually a rather nice mix of expertise, multithreading experience from the Tera side, scalable MPP and vector experience from the Cray Research side.
It's one petaflops sustained performance, not peak. That means actual real scientific codes running at one petaflops, not just Linpack.