GOVERNMENT

Cray Inc. today said it will soon establish a supercomputing center of excellence at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The Cray Supercomputing Center of Excellence will support the DOE's plans to build the world's most powerful supercomputer for open (non-classified) scientific research at ORNL. DOE recently signed a contract for Cray to increase the capability of DOE's National Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory by fielding a 20-teraflop (trillions of calculations per second) Cray X1E scalable vector system and a 20-teraflop Cray XT3 massively parallel superscalar system in 2005. The contract also has options for upgrades to 100 and 250 peak teraflops, which are contingent on Congressional funding. The DOE's National Leadership Computing Capability for Science, as provided by the ORNL supercomputer, will help ensure that the U.S. retains its primacy in critical areas of science and technology, and will enable breakthroughs in areas such as biotechnology, climate change, nanoscience, fusion energy, astrophysics and others. Cray's John Levesque will serve as program director of the new center of excellence. "We are excited about establishing this competency center within DOE's National Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to support one of the world's most important supercomputing initiatives," said Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk. "With an experienced leader like John Levesque, I am confident the new center of excellence will have a major impact in helping researchers achieve scientific breakthroughs, and will enable Cray to expand its relationships with leading scientists and engineers from around the globe." Within the center of excellence, Cray experts in vector and superscalar systems, parallelization, cache and I/O optimization and systems software will work closely with ORNL and DOE Office of Science researchers to provide the leading computational environment needed to support their breakthrough science and engineering. Cray experts will work with these researchers, and other users of the DOE leadership system from around the U.S. and the world, to design, port and optimize critical research applications to run on the National Leadership Computing Facility's Cray supercomputer technology. Cray also expects the close collaboration with ORNL and DOE Office of Science researchers to produce important insights for enhancing future Cray hardware and software technologies. Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences, added that "Cray has been a strong partner to ORNL, DOE and the broader research community around the world for many years. We are excited that they chose our campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee as the location for this important center. We believe it will play a major role in achieving the goals of the National Leadership Computing Facility."