ACADEMIA

Cray Inc. today announced that the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) facility in Washington, D.C., will be home to the largest Cray XD1 supercomputer ever installed. The NRL supercomputer will also employ the largest known number of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) of any system in the world. Equipped with 288 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors and 144 Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, the 24-chassis machine will provide peak performance of 2.5 teraflops, or trillion floating-point operations per second. "The NRL has a long history of using high-performance computing (HPC) systems to conduct research at the leading edge," said Cray's president and chief executive officer Peter Ungaro. "We are especially gratified that they have selected the Cray XD1 supercomputer for their important work in evaluating FPGA-driven performance advantages. Because the Cray XD1 architecture was designed to maximize the benefits of FPGAs and dual-core processors by coupling them with a very high bandwidth link, the NRL is getting a truly state-of-the-art platform that provides exceptional application performance for a multitude of applications." The NRL's Cray XD1 system was purchased through the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), an initiative aimed at delivering a world-class computing capability to the DoD's science and technology and test and evaluation communities. It will replace a 40-processor Cray MTA-2 system that was installed previously. The new supercomputer will be used to evaluate the applicability of FPGAs for DoD-targeted codes. As part of the HPCMP support center, the system will also help solve a variety of demanding problems in areas such as climate and weather modeling, computational fluid dynamics, chemistry and materials science, electromagnetics and acoustics. FPGAs allow engineers to accelerate applications by inserting focused algorithms that offload some of the computational load from the processors -- essentially allowing them to act as specialized co-processors. AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors fit two processors on one die, doubling processing capacity in the same amount of space without boosting power requirements or heat levels. The Cray XD1 system optimizes both these technologies with a high-speed interconnect that makes communications among the processors faster, and also speeds the interchange between the processors and the FPGA devices.