ENGINEERING

Cray today announced that Network Computing Services, Inc. (NCSI) has acquired and installed a Cray X1E vector supercomputer for the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). This system upgrade will nearly triple the performance of the AHPCRC's Cray X1 system that has achieved record-setting results on important defense applications. The order is part of a multi-order award with an aggregate value of over $23 million that Cray has received from the Department of Defense (DoD) HPC Modernization Program. Each Cray X1E multi-streaming processor will have a peak performance of 18.0 billion calculations per second, giving the system aggregate peak performance of 4.6 trillion calculations per second. The combination of its processor speed, exceptionally high bandwidth and I/O capabilities equips the Cray X1E system, like its predecessor, to outperform alternative products on targeted high-end applications. The Cray X1E system upgrade was installed at NCSI on March 3, 2005. "The first full-production Cray X1 system, installed at the AHPCRC starting in March 2003, demonstrated its ability to achieve breakthrough scientific results while running Army applications in computational fluid dynamics, computational mechanics and battlefield weather forecasting that are of great importance to the defense of the United States," said Paul Muzio, NCSI VP-Government Programs and AHPCRC Support Infrastructure Director. Muzio added, "The Cray X1/X1E architecture is unique in its ability to support, in hardware, advanced parallel global addressing programming models, a feature which we believe is important for improving programmer productivity and for critical defense applications in solid and structural mechanics that require extremely low latency communications. These Cray X1E features will allow AHPCRC researchers to expand their activities in the development of those advanced applications in support of the Army." "We are excited to continue serving the needs of the Army, the AHPCRC and the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program for advanced supercomputer technology. Our Cray X1E system--the largest we've shipped to date--will help AHPCRC researchers tackle extraordinarily challenging applications that are important for national defense. We look forward to extending this long-term partnership," said Cray President Peter Ungaro. This procurement gives the Army, the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program, and the Defense science and technology community-at-large, access to a new and important advanced computing capability. Through this, the AHPCRC is also supporting the Defense Science Board's Task Force on Supercomputing recommendation related to the development and acquisition of high-end computing systems with improved processor to global memory latency and bandwidth for critical defense applications. Cray said the following record-setting results on Cray X1 systems were announced earlier: -- An AHPCRC unstructured mesh computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application ran at a sustained speed exceeding one teraflop (one trillion calculations per second) on a Cray X1 supercomputer with 256 multistreaming processors (MSPs). -- The AHPCRC demonstrated the use of the Fifth Generation Mesoscale Weather Forecast Model (MM5) on the Cray X1 to produce 5-kilometer resolution weather forecasts for the entire Continental United States (CONUS), and to produce a 2.5-kilometer CONUS simulation for a 12-hour time period with 15-second time steps (the results of the 2.5-kilometer study are being analyzed to verify the correctness of MM5 at this fine grid spacing). Cray has announced that overall customer-reported scores for the Cray X1 supercomputer system were the best for any high-performance computing (HPC) system on the new HPC Challenge benchmark tests co-sponsored by the DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.