Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Cray Selected for $97M Supercomputer Upgrade

October 12, 2011

Cray has signed a contract to upgrade the Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar" located at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to a new Cray XK6 supercomputer, which will be nicknamed "Titan." When completed, the Titan system will have a peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of high performance computing (HPC) power.

With a groundbreaking combination of efficiency and scalability, the Titan system at ORNL will bring together the features of a proven, production petascale architecture with innovative NVIDIA Tesla graphic processing unit (GPU) technologies to create a supercomputer capable of unprecedented scale. This Cray XK6 system will feature productive, high performance software that leverages a proven, scalable system interconnect and a powerful blend of GPUs and general purpose central processors (CPUs) in a single, tightly integrated supercomputer. As a result, scientists and engineers at ORNL will be able to apply the resources of one the world's most powerful supercomputers to solving some of today's most pressing energy and environmental challenges.

"ORNL and Cray have been working together to optimize the Cray XK6 hardware and software architecture for several years. The result of this collaboration is a system specifically developed for scientific applications," said Jeff Nichols, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "In addition to efficiency and speed, the Cray programming environment allows researchers to continue using Fortran, C, and C++ languages to program the new accelerators."

Signing the contract to transform Jaguar into Titan marks a continuation of an ongoing, collaborative partnership between Cray and ORNL that has resulted in a number of significant supercomputing accomplishments. In 2008, Jaguar set a world record for computer speed with sustained performance of more than a petaflops on two scientific applications, and has subsequently run five applications above that threshold. Cray and ORNL look to continue this trend as the lab's system evolves from a Cray XT5 machine to the new Cray XK6 supercomputer.

"Oak Ridge, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and Cray have a history of accomplishing great things by continually pushing the boundaries of supercomputing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Signing this contract is a significant milestone for our company and our partnership with Oak Ridge because the new system will enable even further amazing scientific achievements. When we announced the Cray XK6 a few months ago, we said it had an architecture capable of scaling to more than 50 petaflops, and Titan will be a major step toward achieving that goal."

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $97 million. The first phase of the contract will include replacing the Cray XT5 compute blades with Cray XK6 compute blades, which will feature the upcoming AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron(TM) processors code-named "Interlagos," Cray's Gemini interconnect, and a subset of Cray XK6 nodes equipped with NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs. The first phase is expected to generate more than $60 million in product revenue and is targeted to be completed in 2011. The second phase of the contract -- equipping the system with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation architecture code-named "Kepler" -- is expected to be completed in the second half of 2012. The contract includes additional upgrade options beyond these two phases that, if exercised, would increase the total value of the contract.

The company had previously disclosed the first phase of the agreement as the order not yet secured that was anticipated to be more than $60 million in potential 2011 revenue. Shipments of the AMD "Interlagos" processors to be used for this system began later than originally anticipated. Although the impact of this delay is uncertain, the Company currently continues to target achieving acceptance of the initial phase of the contract in late 2011.