Supercomputer (Photo : Reuters)
Cray and Intel will work with the United States' Energy Department in building a $200 million "supercomputer" at Illinois' Argonne National Laboratory, Franklin Orr of the Energy Department announced, Wednesday. The super machine will aid biofuel energy technology, wind and solar researches.
The undersecretary Franklin Orr announced that the department of science and energy, together with the independent companies, will target to obtain $200 million worth of Aurora system by 2018. By then, the supercomputer will be opened to all scientists and scientific researchers.
The project is the department's final investment under the "Collaboration of Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Oak Ridge" initiative of moving the country towards an exascale computing status.
Barry Bolding of Cray said, "A productive supercomputer has to be able to solve problems both at scale, but also to use best-of-breed technologies both from a computing standpoint, interconnect and software standpoint. We look at systems as holistic, integrated, productive devices that scientists can use, and put to good use."
Previously, the Department of Energy launched a $325 million as a partial amount for the supercomputing CORAL project in November 2014, the GCWire published. This is a partial fulfillment of the department's plan of installing two supermachines at the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge laboratories with NVIDIA, Mellanox, and IBM technologies.
The undersecretary, also, unveiled that DOE will make use of Aurora for the advancement of low-carbon energy technology and push farther the understanding of the space and the universe as a whole while preserving the country's global leadership in high-performance super-computing.
Intel will be the main Aurora project contractor. It will supply technologies such as its Xeon processors, while Cray will be in-charge of the system integration works.
