Cray has announced that the company has been awarded two supercomputing contracts worth more than $40 million to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernisation Program (HPCMP) with three Cray XC30 supercomputers and two Cray Sonexion storage systems.
The contract consists of one Cray XC30 supercomputer and a Cray Sonexion storage system to be delivered to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and two Cray XC30 supercomputers and a Cray Sonexion storage system to the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC).
Cray will deliver more than six petabytes of storage capacity and more than a 300GBps of storage performance across both storage systems. Cray’s Sonexion storage system combines Cray’s Lustre expertise with a unique design that allows scalability from 5GBps to more than a 1TBps in a single file system – and performs optimally at scale.
Previously code-named ‘Cascade’, the Cray XC30 supercomputers are Cray’s most advanced HPC systems. The Cray XC30 and Cray XC30-AC supercomputers feature the unique Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment supporting a wide range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimised programming environment; and offer the freedom to support a wide variety of processor types.
In operation for more than 20 years, the DoD HPCMP aims to accelerate technological development and to provide superior defense capabilities through the strategic application of HPC, networking and computational expertise. The HPCMP provides the people, expertise and technologies that increase the productivity of the DoD’s Research, Development, Test and Evaluation community.
‘Supercomputing is a critical enabler for the wide variety of science, technology, test, evaluation, and acquisition engineering communities that the DoD HPC Modernization Program supports,’ observed John West, director of the DoD’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Modernisation Program. ‘These new systems are a key component of our strategy of making sure the DoD’s scientists and engineers have access to the most modern, capable, and usable computational tools available.’
The systems associated with these two contracts are expected to be delivered and installed in 2014.
