Cray Lands $97 Million Contract to Upgrade Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc.

today announced the Company has signed a contract to upgrade the Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar" located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to a new Cray XK6 supercomputer, which will be nicknamed "Titan." When completed, the Titan system will have a peak performance between 10 and 20 petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of high performance computing (

) power. With a groundbreaking combination of efficiency and scalability, the Titan system at ORNL will bring together the features of a proven, production petascale architecture with innovative NVIDIA®

Tesla™ graphic processing unit (

) technologies to create a supercomputer capable of unprecedented scale. This Cray XK6 system will feature productive, high performance software that leverages a proven, scalable system interconnect and a powerful blend of GPUs and general purpose central processors (CPUs) in a single, tightly integrated supercomputer. As a result, scientists and engineers at ORNL will be able to apply the resources of one the world's most powerful supercomputers to solving some of today's most pressing energy and environmental challenges. "ORNL and Cray have been working together to optimize the Cray XK6 hardware and software architecture for several years. The result of this collaboration is a system specifically developed for scientific applications," said Jeff Nichols, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "In addition to efficiency and speed, the Cray programming environment allows researchers to continue using Fortran, C, and C++ languages to program the new accelerators."