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August
15, 2002
Department
of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab to Test New
Cray Supercomputer for U.S. Science
OAK RIDGE, TENN. - The Department of Energy today
announced that its Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL) has been selected to test the effectiveness
of a new Cray Inc. supercomputer architecture
in solving important scientific problems in climate,
fusion, biology, nanoscale materials and astrophysics.
"This program is one of the first steps in
an initiative designed to provide U.S. scientists
with the computational power that is essential
to 21st century scientific leadership," said
Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, director of the department's
Office of Science. The program is part of an effort
to provide the U.S. scientific community with
computing resources to match or exceed those of
the new Japanese "Earth Simulator,"
which has an effective speed more than 20 times
that of the fastest U.S. civilian supercomputer.
Dr. Orbach made the announcement following an
annual, onsite review of the laboratory.
Under the program, ORNL will acquire a 32-processor
Cray X1 supercomputer system. Contract negotiations
are expected to be completed within about one
month. The lab's Center for Computational Sciences
and Cray will evaluate the processors, memory
and scalability of the design and software environment
of the system to determine its suitability for
the solution of complex scientific problems. The
Cray X1 system, currently in development, is the
first U.S. computer to offer vector processing
and massively parallel processing capabilities
in a single architecture. It is designed to scale
to deliver performance for scientific applications
greater than the performance of currently available
U.S. computers. Japan's Earth Simulator computer
also employs an advanced vector processing design.
"Oak Ridge National Laboratory is proud to
be part of this extraordinarily important initiative,"
said ORNL director Bill Madia. "We are committed
to working with Cray and the scientific community
to make this initiative a success." The lab's
Center for Computational Sciences was established
in 1991 to evaluate new computer architectures
for science.
"We are excited at the prospect of providing
the next generation supercomputer to help solve
the most demanding classes of scientific and engineering
problems," said James Rottsolk, Cray Chairman
and CEO. "We are pleased to enter into collaboration
with the Department of Energy and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in this important endeavor."
Media Contact:
Number: PR-02-163
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