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."

Comments

Aha. Bulldozer sucks my ass.

[unity100]

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.

Re:Aha. Bulldozer sucks my ass.

[dutchwhizzman]

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 Maybe AMD was the best platform to use when these computers were originally designed, but they are outdated now.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.

Re:Totally surprised.

[wezelboy]

The Cray name was bought from SGI by Tera. SGI was later bought by Rackable.

Re:Jurassic Park

[Dyinobal]

I'm referring to the Novel not the movie. But thank you for playing.

Re:Jurassic Park

[LWATCDR]

There was a time when Supercomputer meant Cray. I remember seeing pictures of Crays when I was a kid and saying. "That is what a computer should look like".

Re:Wow

[DrgnDancer]

Cray has had Supercomputers on the top ten list (and even in the number one spot) again for years now. Ever since they spun off from SGI they've had one of the more interesting architectures in HPC. I was interviewing at ORNL when they were installing Jaguar, and I got a pretty in depth description of the hows and the whys. It's no longer the most powerful computer in the world, but it's still a very impressive piece of machinery. Sigh. I really need to get back into HPC.

Completely different contract/machine/goals

[gentryx]

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.