from Tuesday, February 25, 2003 The Oak Ridger

original URL:
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/022503/new_0225030006.html

ORNL, Cray teaming for next-generation supercomputer

With the delivery next month of the Cray X1 supercomputer, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cray Inc. will take an important step toward investigating computer architectures for scientific discovery, according to an ORNL press release.

The Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL will deploy the Cray X1 system to test its effectiveness in solving important scientific problems in climate, biology, nanoscale materials, fusion and astrophysics.

Raymond L. Orbach, director of DOE's Office of Science, said in a prepared statement the ORNL-Cray partnership is one of the first steps in the initiative to explore computational architectures essential to 21st-century scientific leadership. "Modern computational methods are developing at such a rapid rate that computational simulation is possible on a scale that is comparable in importance with experiment and theory," Orbach stated.

Under the program, ORNL and Cray will evaluate the processors, memory and scalability of the architecture and software environment of the X1 system to determine its effectiveness for the solution of the most challenging scientific problems. The Cray X1 is the first U.S. computer to offer vector processing and massively parallel processing capabilities in a single architecture. The system has been specifically designed for scientific applications.

Initial delivery of the eight-cabinet expandable Cray X1 system is expected to begin in March, and the system should be fully deployed at ORNL by the end of September.

The Center for Computational Sciences was established at ORNL in 1991 to evaluate the suitability of new computer architectures for scientific applications and to deliver leadership class computing capability to the scientific community.

An important part of the initiative with Cray, according to the release, is to ensure that the next generation computer hardware and systems software are appropriately balanced for scientific needs.

CCS is working closely with the academic and laboratory community in evaluating and deploying the Cray system. To address the challenge of climate prediction, CCS is working with the climate community to adapt the Community Climate System Model to the Cray X1 and determine the effectiveness of the machine in simulating regional detail using global circulation models.

The Cray computer will be funded through the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program in the department's Office of Science. The Energy Department's most recent supercomputer announcement was in November 2002.