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Cray Inc. announced that it has received an order for a 12-chassis Cray XD1 supercomputer system for the Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA). Financial terms were not disclosed. After successful testing and evaluation of a three-chassis pre-production Cray XD1 system at ASA's Alabama Supercomputer Center, ASA approved implementation of the full system. Cray recently installed a 72-processor Cray XD1 system at the Alabama Supercomputer Center in Huntsville, AL. Later this year, the system will be expanded to a full cabinet of 144 AMD Opteron" processors with 634 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) of peak processing power. Each of these installations will represent the largest configurations of the Cray XD1 installed to date. Randy Fulmer, CEO of ASA, said that the Cray XD1 system "will provide a leading-edge resource to Alabama's academic community for the advancement of science and engineering research to meet national and state priorities. All education institutions in Alabama will have access to this new Cray XD1 system for collaborative research efforts." The acquisition of the Cray XD1 system is part of a collaborative agreement between the University of Alabama and ASA. Dr. David Dixon, Ramsay Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alabama, said the new system initially will target research in computational chemistry and biology. "The high bandwidth and low latency of the Cray XD1 system's RapidArray" interconnect promise to provide substantial improvements in computational efficiency over more traditional clustered and distributed HPC systems." Background: The Alabama Supercomputer Authority (ASA) is a state-funded corporation founded in 1989 to operate the Alabama Supercomputer Center (ASC) and the Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN). The Alabama Supercomputer Authority provides Internet, Internet2, technology services, and high performance computing resources to Alabama's K12 schools, colleges, and universities. The Cray XD1 supercomputer features the direct connect processor (DCP) architecture, which removes PCI bottlenecks and memory contention to deliver superior sustained performance. The Cray XD1 has the lowest latency of any current HPC system, with MPI latency of 1.8 microseconds in measured tests conducted using the Ohio State MPI benchmark. The tests show that the Cray XD1 ships messages with four times lower MPI latency than common cluster interconnects such as Infiniband, Quadrics or Myrinet, and 30 times lower than Gigabit Ethernet employed in lowest-cost clusters. The Cray XD1's interconnect delivers twice the throughput of Infiniband for messages up to 1 KB and 60 percent higher throughput for very large messages. The Linux/Opteron system runs x86 32/64-bit codes. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are available to accelerate applications, and the Active Manager subsystem provides single system command and control and high availability features. A 3VU (5.25") chassis provides 12 compute processors, 58 peak gigaflops, 96 GB/second aggregate switching capacity, 1.8-microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 84 GB maximum memory and 1.5 TB maximum disk storage. A 12-chassis rack provides 144 compute processors, up to 691 peak gigaflops, 1TB/second aggregate switching capacity, 2 microsecond MPI interprocessor latency, 922 GB/second aggregate memory bandwidth, 1 TB maximum memory and 18 TB maximum disk storage.