HPCwire
 The global publication of record for High Performance Computing / May 7, 2004: Vol. 13, No. 18

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Vendor Spotlight:

CRAY ANNOUNCES ORDERS FOR SUPERCOMPUTERS FROM PSC, GMRI

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. announced that the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has placed an advance order for the company's upcoming product based on the Sandia "Red Storm" supercomputer. This is the first disclosed customer for the new product line, which will be launched later this year. Financial terms were not revealed.

Cray plans to deliver a "Red Storm" system in third-quarter 2004 to PSC's Pittsburgh facility. PSC will provide scientists with early access to the system's advanced massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and will also collaborate with Cray on specialized applications and other advanced software development.

"This advance order from PSC, one of the world's leading supercomputing sites, is an important milestone for the 'Red Storm' product," said Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "It is hard evidence of the high interest level we are seeing in this innovative architecture."

PSC Scientific Co-director and University of Pittsburgh Professor Ralph Roskies stated, "This new architecture will make possible major scientific breakthroughs by enabling important applications which couldn't scale well using clusters with today's weaker inter-node interconnect technologies."

"We are very excited to, once again, work with Cray to advance the state-of- the-art in high-end scientific computing," said Michael Levine, PSC's scientific director from Carnegie Mellon University. "Together, we will deploy a system of exquisite balance and prodigious capability."

PSC, in partnership with Cray, has consistently had early access to the most powerful new computing resources designed to solve important scientific problems.

Supercomputing veteran and PSC's Director of Special Projects Jim Kasdorf added, "Cray's new product, made openly available to the U.S. research community by PSC, will significantly increase the competitiveness of our nation's scientists and high-performance computing industry."

"Red Storm" is a 40-TeraOps (40 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer Cray is scheduled to deliver this year to Sandia National Laboratories under a $93 million Department of Energy contract. Cray announced plans to develop the Red Storm-based product in October 2003.

"The product targets the need for highly scalable microprocessor-based supercomputers with high bandwidth. It is designed to be more efficient and cost-effective for challenging problems and workloads than the clustered SMP systems available in the marketplace today," according to Peter Ungaro, Cray's vice president of worldwide marketing and sales. "Together with Sandia National Laboratories, who partnered with Cray in designing the 'Red Storm' architecture, we are very excited that PSC has selected 'Red Storm' for their very diverse and demanding scientific supercomputing workload."

CRAY RECEIVES ORDER FOR CRAY X1 SUPERCOMPUTER FROM GMRI

In other news, Cray Inc. announced that it has received an order for a Cray X1 supercomputer system from GMRI. Under the contract terms, the Cray X1 system was recently installed at the NASA Ames Research Center facility in Moffett Field, California. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Cray X1 system will be used for a joint evaluation and development program aimed at porting NASA applications codes and testing their effectiveness on the system.

"The Cray X1 system was acquired to support NASA 's Earth Sciences and Aeronautics Enterprise High End Computing partnership, which is fielding test beds in the most promising supercomputer architectures. This is a cooperative program that involves NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ," said Dr. Walt Brooks, chief of the NASA Ames Advanced Supercomputing Division. "The multi-center team will work together on porting codes and optimizing the CRAY system for NASA's most challenging engineering and science problems."

"This important collaboration with GMRI and NASA is another important milestone in Cray's return to HPC leadership," said Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "The Cray X1 supercomputer is a highly balanced system that has already demonstrated unrivaled performance on very large, complex customer problems."

"GMRI appreciates the opportunity to serve NASA and other agencies by supplying the complete line of Cray products on the GMRI NASA SEWP III (GWAC) contract," said GMRI Senior Vice President Lonnie Landers.

About Cray Inc.

Cray's mission is to be the premier provider of supercomputing solutions for its customers' most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Go to http://www.cray.com for more information about the company.


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