HPCwire: Cray to Deploy Cascade System at DOE Center

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

June 27, 2012

Cray to Deploy Cascade System at DOE Center

SEATTLE, WA, Jun 27 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced it will install a next-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade" and a next-generation Cray Sonexion storage system at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Cray's Cascade system will provide an innovative supercomputing resource to NERSC users working to advance open science research in climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets. NERSC is also home to a Cray XE6 supercomputer, named "Hopper."

"From energy efficient batteries to climate change, NERSC's 4,500 users are tackling problems that are of vital importance to our nation's competiveness and sustainability, so it is critical that our next system NERSC-7, deliver readily accessible performance on real-world applications," says Kathy Yelick, Associate Laboratory Director of Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab.

According to Yelick, it is also important that NERSC provide supercomputing resources to users in an energy efficient manner, and she says the new Cray system will enable many pioneering features on this front, including the ability to run year-round using "free-cooling" at the NERSC site. "This approach utilizes water from cooling towers only, not mechanical chillers, to provide exceptional energy efficiency. The moderate Bay Area climate combined with Cray's new design will allow us to keep power for cooling to less than 10 percent of the power used for computing," said Jeff Broughton, head of NERSC's System's Department.

"The researchers and scientists at NERSC are tackling an amazing set of important challenges across a wide range of scientific disciplines, and we are incredibly honored to provide their vast user community with a productive environment that also delivers high sustained performance," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Our development team has been busy working on our future products and we are very excited to see that the new innovations in our next generation of supercomputers and storage solutions are meeting the needs of leading customers such as NERSC. They are a great partner and we are excited that our relationship with them will continue."

Cray's next-generation Cascade supercomputer, which is expected to be widely available in the first half of 2013, is the next step in Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The system will provide over two petaflops of peak performance for NERSC. The system will feature major advancements of the Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, and the next-generation Aries interconnect chipset. Cascade will also feature support for Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors -- a first for Cray's high-end systems. The Cascade supercomputer is in part made possible by Cray's participation in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program.

The Cray Sonexion storage system delivered to NERSC will scale to more than six petabytes of usable storage and more 140 gigabytes per second of sustained aggregate IO performance. Sonexion brings together an integrated file system, software and storage offering that has been designed specifically for a wide range of HPC workloads, providing users with an integrated, scalable Lustre solution that is easy to install and maintain. Cray's Sonexion storage system combines powerful servers, the latest Lustre parallel file system and efficient management software into a modular and scalable storage product that is tested at scale, and supported as a complete solution by Cray.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase procurement is valued at more than $40 million. The system is expected to go into production in 2013.

About NERSC The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which is part of the DOE's Office of Science. The NERSC Center currently serves thousands of scientists at national laboratories and universities across the country researching problems in climate modeling, computational biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines. Established in 1974, the NERSC Center has long been a leader in providing systems, services and expertise to advance computational science throughout the DOE research community. NERSC is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under contract with DOE. For more information about the NERSC Center, go to http://www.nersc.gov .

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov .

About Cray Inc.

As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology is designed to enable scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

-----

Source: Cray Inc.

Share Options

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in join the Discussion

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Subscribe to All Content

All

June 28, 2012

June 27, 2012

June 26, 2012

June 25, 2012

June 21, 2012

June 20, 2012

June 19, 2012

Feature Articles

The Uber-Cloud Experiment

Even with its promise of easy access to pay-per-use computing, HPC-as-a-Service as a delivery model has yet to be widely embraced by high performance computing users. In this article, authors Wolfgang Gentzsch and Burak Yenier describe an HPC service experiment that brings together industry users, resource providers, software providers, and HPC experts, which they believe will help pave the way for wider adoption.
Read more...

Lawrence Livermore, IBM Offer Petascale Supercomputer to Industry

One by one, US government HPC labs are getting into the industry partnership business. The latest is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), who this week announced it was teaming with IBM to form "Deep Computing Solutions," a collaboration that is being folded into LLNL’s new High Performance Computing Innovation Center,
Read more...

An HPC Programming Model for the Exascale Age

As the supercomputing faithful prepare for exascale computing, there is a great deal of talk about moving beyond the two-decades-old MPI programming model . The HPC programmers of tomorrow are going to have to write codes that are able to deal with systems hundreds of times larger than the top supercomputers of today, and the general feeling is that MPI, by itself, will not make that transition gracefully. One of the alternatives being offered is a PGAS model known as GASPI...
Read more...

Read more HPCwire features...

Around the Web

Supercomputer Learns How to Recognize Cats

Jun 28, 2012 | Google scientists build neural network with visual smarts.
Read more...

Changing the Phase of Memory

Jun 26, 2012 | Researchers look to boost speed of phase change memory.
Read more...

Supercomputer Sails Through World History

Jun 25, 2012 | SGI 's new UV 2 super swallows Wikipedia and maps the history of the world.
Read more...

Read more headlines...

Tackling the Data Deluge: File Systems and Storage Technologies

06/25/2012 | NetApp | A single hour of data collection can result in 7+ million files from just one camera. Collection opportunities are limited and must be successful every time. As defense and intelligence agencies seek to use the data collected to make mission-critical battlefield decisions, there’s greater emphasis on smart data and imagery collection, capture, storage and analysis to drive real-time intelligence. The data gathered must accurately and systematically be analyzed, integrated and disseminated to those who need it – troops on the ground. This reality leads to an inevitable challenge – warfighters swimming in sensors, drowning in data. With the millions, if not billions, of sensors providing all-seeing reports of the combat environment, managing the overload demands a file system and storage infrastructure that scales and performs while protecting the data collected. Part II of our whitepaper series highlights NetApp’s scalable, modular, and flexible storage solution to handle the demanding requirements of sophisticated ISR environments.