Cray is currently working on a next-generation massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer, that will be shipped to the University of Tennessee when it is finished. Probably the most powerful
in the world, the petaflop-scale monolith will be used in scientific research, including global climate change research, natural disaster modeling and human brain explorations.
The new supercomputer punches a little below 1 petaflop of computing power (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) when working at full capacity. "Cray XT4" is extremely scalable and its computing power can be further expanded.
The system will be built around AMD's new quad-core Opteron chips. The computer itself will be built during this year, but the petaflop capabilities will be added during 2009. The computing colossus will be hosted at the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Institute for Computational Sciences.
"It is critical that the academic community have access to industry-leading computing resources, allowing researchers to address the most computationally-challenging problems in science," said Thomas Zacharia, both University of Tennessee vice president for science and technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory associate director for computing and computational sciences.
Cray's new supercomputer is built around a high-speed 3D torus interconnect and runs on an advanced MPP operating system. It will come with an impressive amount of more than 120,000 processor cores, that will receive data via a high-speed global input/output system.
"This system will enable researchers to work on the biggest, most complex science and engineering applications, solving larger problems faster and running more accurate simulations. We want to thank the NSF for recognizing the importance of HPC in achieving the scientific breakthroughs that advance society and impact our everyday lives," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.
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