SEATTLE, 11 Feb. 2008.Global supercomputer company Cray Inc. has entered into an agreement with Sandia National Laboratories to upgrade its "Red Storm" supercomputer, already one of the world's largest systems, from 124 teraflops (one trillion floating points per second) to 284 teraflops. This boost in performance will allow researchers and scientists to run higher resolution models to increase the accuracy of critical computer simulations.
Sandia and Cray co-designed Red Storm as part of a contract under the National Nuclear Security Agency's (NNSA) Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC). The Red Storm design became the basis for the highly scalable and successful Cray XT line of massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputers that have been installed at a number of prestigious supercomputing centers around the world.
"This is another significant step in the evolution of this important system," says Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Initially a 40 teraflops machine, this is its second major upgrade, adding in Cray XT technology to take Red Storm to seven times its original performance level. Cray's entire line of MPP systems is built to be uniquely expandable and upgradeable, and Sandia has substantially leveraged their original investment while achieving the Department of Energy's NNSA program's ambitious computational goals. This new performance level will allow researchers to tackle even larger computational problems including calculations that have never been successfully completed before."
The upgrade, scheduled to take place this summer, will include integrating Quad Core AMD Opteron processors into a substantial portion of the system as well as increasing the available memory to 2GB per computational core across the entire system.
Robert Meisner, deputy director of ASC at the NNSA, says: "The more than twofold increase in computing power provided by this upgrade will provide important capacity for tackling national security problems."
