cray

The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan -- believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world -- to research things such as climate change and … Read more

Supercomputer maker Cray will sell its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to Intel for $140 million in cash, the two companies announced today.

Up to 74 Cray employees will join Intel, Cray said. The company currently employs approximately 800 people worldwide.

"By broadening our relationship with Intel, we are positioned to further penetrate the [high-performance computing] market," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, in a statement.

Ungaro continued, "This agreement also dramatically strengthens our balance sheet and increases our options for further growth, profitability and creating shareholder value."

Cray said it … Read more

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Many great masterpieces reside in museums. There's the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre. "Nighthawks at the Diner" graces the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Cray-1 sits at the Bradbury Science Museum here in Los Alamos.

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 at a cost of $8.8 million. It set a new world record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and boasted 8MB of main memory. According to the museum, it was the first computer to break the megaflop barrier.

By today's hardware standards, the Cray-1 is a great lumbering beast. The dramatic lighting shining on it at the Bradbury exhibit shows off its curves and hulking size. But by 1976 standards, it was a svelte creation whose circular shape kept the complex wiring compact. … Read more

The University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has contracted with Cray to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. That computer will tap AMD's new 16-core processor.

Blue Waters will be composed of more than 235 Cray XE6 cabinets based on the AMD's Opteron 6200 Series processor (formerly code-named "Interlagos") and more than 30 cabinets of a future version of the recently announced Cray XK6 supercomputer with Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs), Cray said. All of this will be combined into a single, powerful hybrid supercomputer.

The … Read more

Cray will put Nvidia graphics processors in future large-scale supercomputers, the companies said today.

The announcement follows this summer's jump to the No. 2 spot in global rankings of China's Nvidia-equipped Nebulae supercomputer.

At Nvidia's 2010 GPU Technology Conference today in San Jose, Calif., supercomputer leader Cray announced that it is developing supercomputers that can use Nvidia Tesla 20-Series graphics processing units.

"We're putting this technology--the next generation of Nvidia Tesla--in our large XE6 systems," Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division, said in a phone interview. Cray's largest system, Jaguar, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, based on processors from Advanced Micro Devices, is currently ranked No. 1 in the world, according to the Top 500 list.

Cray, which already uses Nvidia GPUs in its low-end desktop supercomputers, is targeting Nvidia's supercomputer-specific Tesla processors for accelerating "modeling code" for scientific applications in its Cray XE6 product line, according to Bolding.

"We're doing this because Nvidia is starting to produce accelerators (GPUs) that are useful to our customers. They've done some enhancements that go beyond a normal graphics accelerator. A couple of years ago, those (Nvidia) GPUs did not have functionality that was appealing to our customers."

Bolding continued. "What we'll see first is the data centers that run a few key applications on the accelerators. The data center that has to run 500 applications? That's the data center that won't move over to accelerators," he said. … Read more

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will develop an exascale supercomputer, as Moore's Law and conventional computing designs begin hitting a wall, the government agency said Friday.

DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program seeks "to create an innovative, revolutionary new generation of computing systems that overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach," the agency said in a statement. Companies involved in the project include Intel and Nvidia.

The UHPC program addresses priorities set out by President Obama's "Strategy for American Innovation" to achieve "exascale" and energy-efficient computing, DARPA said. One … Read more

Though most of us had to watch our wallets last year, some didn't mind spending $3 million or more for a new supercomputer.

The overall market for high-performance computers (HPCs) and servers fell last year, bringing in sales of $8.6 billion, an 11.6 percent drop from $9.7 billion in 2008, according to the "Worldwide High Performance Technical Server QView" report released Wednesday by IDC. Shipments were down 40 percent from the prior year.

But one segment unfazed by the recession was the supercomputer. Sales of HPCs costing more than $3 million jumped by 65 … Read more

Supercomputer maker Cray's custom engineering group has teamed up with Microsoft Research to look into lowering the costs of running cloud-computing data centers.

The initiative will make use of the high-performance computing specialist's intellectual property in system design, including high-density packaging, Cray said in its announcement Tuesday. The partners will also work on efficient power delivery and cooling innovations, with the aim of reducing facility, power, and hardware costs.

"The results of the project have the potential to deliver significant cost savings for operating a cloud-computing data center," said Chuck Morreale, Cray vice president of custom … Read more

Supercomputers are in the news again. First Microsoft has a new version of its Excel program that can tear spreadsheets that used to take weeks to calculate, down into a few hours. Then we've got results released early Monday that unveil which company gets to claim its supercomputer as the fastest among the top 500 in the world.

We also get CNET News senior writer Greg Sandoval on the phone to talk about what's going on with Hulu, and why it may soon cost you money to watch your favorite TV shows and movies on the popular site. … Read more