Supercomputer deals go to Cray, SGI

Cray Inc., Seattle, has been selected to develop and build a supercomputer system for Sandia National Laboratories, the company announced June 18.

Under Sandia's "Red Storm" procurement, which has an expected value of about $90 million, Cray will serve as the integrator to assemble the supercomputing system, said company spokesman Jerry Loe.

The company was chosen in a competitive process and is under final negotiations with Sandia over terms of the contract, said Chris Miller, spokesman for Sandia. The contract is expected to be finalized in about a month, he said.

Sandia is a laboratory of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

The news follows another recent Cray win. On June 10, the company announced two orders totaling nearly $19 million from unnamed Department of Defense offices.

Those orders are for air-cooled prototypes of the company's next-generation SV2 system, currently under development, that the company claims will have marked improvements in memory bandwidth, interconnections and vector-processing capabilities.

"We continue to make solid progress on the development of the SV2 system," said Jim Rottsolk, Cray president and chief executive officer. "Our partners are now able to see real applications running on SV2 systems."

Also on the supercomputer front, Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif., is upgrading a supercomputer it supplied to the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the company announced June 18.

The computer, overseen by NASA's advanced supercomputing division, is being used for NASA'S Information Power Grid, a network of geographically dispersed computational resources being made available for NASA researchers and other researchers worldwide.

"The future of high-performance computing will see faster, higher-processor-count supercomputers serving researchers located hundreds or thousands of miles from where the machines are located," said John Ziebarth, who is the advanced supercomputing division chief for NASA.

This upgrade will bring a 37 percent performance improvement in some applications, according to SGI Federal, the Silver Spring-based SGI company that is undertaking the work. The machine's 1,024 400-megahertz speed processors will be replaced by an equivalent number of 600 megahertz processors, enabling a potential improvement in performance from 819 gigaflops to 1229 gigaflops.

This work is being done as part of a $23 million contract, announced in August 2000, to supply and maintain the NASA Ames supercomputer, according to Greg Slabodkin, spokesman for SGI Federal. Nicknamed "Chapman," that supercomputer began operations in August 2001.