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The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has placed an advance order for the Cray XD1 supercomputer and will receive an early version of the new high-performance computing system later this month. This will be the first Cray XD1 system made available to the scientific community. The new system contains novel architecture that enables its hardware to be reconfigured to quickly free up massive amounts of memory for such PNNL data-intensive science as power grid simulation, bioinformatics and information analysis. The laboratory plans to take delivery of the early Cray XD1 supercomputer on June 29, for use on its Richland, Wash., campus. The system will be installed at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, home of the world's 5th fastest supercomputer and a DOE user facility that attracts researchers from government, industry and academia nationwide. The early system will be upgraded with a production model Cray XD1 system in the fall. George Michaels, PNNL associate laboratory director, said the lab's acquisition of the Cray XD1 will enable PNNL "to continue our leadership in applying high-performance scientific computing to some of the nation's important problems. The Cray XD1 will be an indispensable tool for PNNL engineers and scientists to bring a new approach to simulate and analyze faster, solve more complex data intensive problems, and bring science to solutions sooner." Scott Studham, associate director of the PNNL advanced computing effort, explained that the Cray XD1 is the first system to locate field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) near memory, a feature that makes it particularly valuable for high-performance scientific computing. Business and public inquiries on this and other PNNL research and technologies should be directed to 1-888-375-PNNL or inquiry@pnl.gov. PNNL is a DOE Office of Science laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences by advancing the understanding of physics, chemistry, biology and computation. PNNL employs 3,800 staff, has a $600 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965.