Cray has managed to snag another new contract for a supercomputer and this time it’s the Department of Energy (DOE) who wants to upgrade their computer. After evaluating a range of systems it decided to go with the system that offered the highest practical performance and this was coincidently also the system with the best price/performance ratio, I.e. it decided to go with Cray’s AMD-based supercomputer platform. The performance of the system was measured up to 16 trillion calculations per second, with a theoretical maximum of 100 trillion per second.
“While the theoretical peak speed of supercomputers may be good for bragging rights, it’s not an accurate indicator of how the machine will perform when running actual research codes,” said Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division at Berkeley Lab. “To better gauge how well a system will meet the needs of our 2,500 users, we developed SSP. According to this test, the new system will deliver over 16 teraflops on a sustained basis.”
Another nice trophy for AMD’s Opteron series. The construction of the computer will start this year already and it is estimated to be up and running in its first appearance at the mid of next year. Eventually the system is suppose to reach up to petaflop performance, but when that will happen remains to be seen.
