Cray Replaces IBM To Build $188M Supercomputer 99
wiredmikey writes "Supercomputer maker Cray today said that the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) awarded the company a contract to build a supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. The supercomputer will be powered by new 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named 'Interlagos') a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA, called 'Kepler,' and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. IBM was originally selected to build the supercomputer in 2007, but terminated the contract in August 2011, saying the project was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support beyond its original expectations. Once fully deployed, the system is expected to have a sustained performance of more than one petaflops on demanding scientific applications."
Re:Aha. Bulldozer sucks my ass. (Score:5, Informative)
Obligatory car metaphore: Most car manufacturers put old technology in cars they bring out today as well, just because the cost of developing new technology and building production lines is commercially prohibitive.
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:3, Informative)
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation [wikipedia.org]
Re:Totally surprised. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Aha. Bulldozer sucks my ass. (Score:2, Informative)
It is true that it costs a lot to switch processors, but lets remember that HPC systems are also very price sensitive. Blue waters will have more than 50,000 processor sockets in it. Xeon processors may be better than opterons, but they also cost a LOT more. Multiply that by 50,000. In the benchmarks I've seen, 16 core opterons almost compete with 8 core xeons in raw performance, but blow the xeons away in price/performance.