Seattle, WA and Frankfurt, Germany — At the 2015 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, global supercomputer leader Cray announced the company has been awarded a contract to provide a Cray XC40 supercomputer to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). This contract marks the first-ever Cray supercomputer to be installed at TACC.
The Cray XC40 system at TACC will be located at the University of Texas at Austin’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus, and is the latest addition to the Center’s legacy of Lonestar supercomputers. Named “Lonestar5,” the new Cray system will have a peak performance of more than 1.2 petaflops, and will serve as the primary high performance computing resource in the UT Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative.
Sponsored by the University of Texas System, the UTRC provides new capabilities that advance current and future research across all University of Texas institutions. The UTRC enables researchers in all 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with each other and compete at the forefront of science and discovery.
“We are very pleased to add this exciting Cray supercomputing architecture as a part of our ecosystem,” said Bill Barth, Director of High Performance Computing at TACC. “We expect Lonestar5 to be the workhorse system for computational science researchers across the University of Texas.”
TACC is one of the premier high performance computing centers in the United States, and is highly regarded for the application of supercomputing and big data to basic and applied sciences. The Cray XC40 system is expected to be deployed in 2015.
“Both TACC and Cray share a common vision for how supercomputers can have profound impacts on our daily lives by powering scientific discoveries that change the world,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “This belief in the power of supercomputing is what drives us to provide our customers with advanced, innovative technologies for taking on the most difficult challenges. We are very excited that TACC has added a Cray to the Lonestar lineage, and we look forward to providing their users with a powerful tool for achieving scientific breakthroughs.”
Cray XC40 supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of today’s most demanding HPC users. Special features of the Cray XC40 supercomputer include: the industry-leading Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; optional DataWarp applications I/O flash SSD accelerator technology; innovative cooling systems to lower customers’ total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance and tightly integrated Cray Linux Environment that supports a wide range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.
