SEATTLE, Wash., 24 Jan. 2006. Cray Inc. announced today that it has won the competition to provide the United Kingdom's AWE plc with one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, a Cray XT3 system with peak performance of over 40 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second).
AWE, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, is responsible for providing warheads for the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent. The design and stewardship of such complex systems has traditionally required the highest capability computer systems available, particularly since the UK became a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the last decade. AWE is one of the largest high technology research, design development and production facilities in the country. For more information, see www.awe.co.uk.
"This investment will enable us to make advances on a range of scientific fronts -- including weapon physics, materials science and engineering -- which will underpin our continued ability to underwrite the safety and effectiveness of the Trident warhead in the Comprehensive Test Ban era," said Dr Brian Bowsher, AWE's director for research and applied science.
The contract calls for Cray to ship the new supercomputer to AWE in second-quarter 2006, and for the system to enter full production in the second half of 2006. The contract, including services, is valued at more than 20 million British pounds.
The Cray XT3 system, Cray's third-generation massively parallel processing product, was designed from the ground up to deliver the cost advantages of microprocessors and to operate efficiently and reliably at large scale. The system uses Cray purpose-built interconnect technology, as well as the AMD Opteron processor's Direct Connect architecture and HyperTransport technology, to connect processors and memory at high speed. Each component in the Cray XT3 system, from the HPC-optimized operating system, to the high-efficiency cooling system and the integrated management system, is designed to ensure jobs involving thousands of processors run to completion.
The Cray XT3 supercomputer -- co-developed by Cray and Sandia National Laboratories -- has set new standards for systems based on standard microprocessors, demonstrating much higher percentage of peak performance on real applications. Sandia has achieved exceptional performance results at record scale since deploying the Red Storm system, running key applications across 10,000 processors or more.
Brian Maskell, AWE's manager for future systems, noted that, "With almost 30 times our current computing power, as measured on AWE's rigorous benchmark tests, the new Cray supercomputer will enable us to explore even more complex mathematical models in three dimensions. To put this power in perspective, the six billion inhabitants of earth would have to make nearly 7,000 calculations per second each to keep up with our new Cray. We anticipate that this would be the fastest system in Europe if installed today."
"We are excited that AWE will be using Cray's latest technology to fulfill its extremely important mission," said Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro. "We had Cray systems at AWE 10 years ago and are proud to have AWE back as a partner. This will be Cray's largest system in Europe and our first Cray XT3 contract worldwide with dual-core processors. The AWE win is a very important addition to Cray's international presence."
Cray won the AWE procurement against fierce competition across the industry. "The Cray XT3 system was the clear performance leader on AWE's demanding applications," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "The Cray XT3 supercomputer is delivering on its promise to provide a high level of sustained application performance and is ideally suited for capability-type computing. It allows real applications to scale up to several thousands of processors, something that simply cannot be achieved on a standard HPC cluster."
As the global leader in HPC, Cray provides innovative supercomputing systems that enable scientists and engineers in government, industry and academia to meet both existing and future computational challenges. Building on years of experience in designing, developing, marketing and servicing the world's most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of HPC systems that deliver unrivaled sustained performance on a wide range of applications. For more information, see www.cray.com.
