Cray has inked a deal with the federal government to make a faster, better supercomputer for the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The $97 million contract empowers Cray to upgrade the Cray XT5 supercomputer, also known as Jaguar, to a Cray XK6 supercomputer that will go by the moniker of Titan.
Once Cray finishes its work, the Titan system will have a peak performance 
of between 10 petaflops and 20 petaflops of high-performance computing power, or HPC. A petaflop makes possible a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. Cray will depend on technologies like petascale architecture and Nvidia Tesla graphic processors to drive Titan.
The Cray XK6 will also use high-performance software that leverages a scalable system interconnect and a blend of GPUs and general-purpose central processors in a single, tightly integrated supercomputer. The result: ORNL scientists and engineers will be able to apply the supercomputing resources to solving energy and environmental challenges.
"ORNL and Cray have been working together to optimize the Cray XK6 hardware and software architecture for several years. The result of this collaboration is a system specifically developed for scientific applications," said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge. "In addition to efficiency and speed, the Cray programming environment allows researchers to continue using Fortran, C, and C++ languages to program the new accelerators."
A New World Record?
Transforming Jaguar into Titan is the latest project in a long collaborative partnership between Cray and ORNL. The partnership has driven several significant supercomputing accomplishments.
In 2008, for example, Jaguar set a world record for computer speed with sustained performance of more than a petaflops on two scientific applications, and has since run five applications above that threshold. Cray and ORNL are working to continue this trend as the lab's system evolves from a Cray XT5 machine to the new Cray XK6 supercomputer.
"Signing this contract is a significant milestone for our company and our partnership with Oak Ridge because the new system will enable even further amazing scientific achievements," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "When we announced the Cray XK6 a few months ago, we said it had an architecture capable of scaling to more than 50 petaflops, and Titan will be a major step toward achieving that goal."
Ready but Waiting
It will be some time before the supercomputing world welcomes Titan. The first phase of the contract will include replacing the Cray XT5 compute blades with Cray XK6 compute blades, which will feature the coming AMD Opteron processors code-named "Interlagos," Cray's Gemini interconnect, and a subset of Cray XK6 nodes equipped with Nvidia Tesla 20-series GPUs.
The first phase is expected to generate more than $60 million in product revenue and is targeted to be completed in 2011. The second phase of the contract -- equipping the system with Nvidia Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation architecture dubbed "Kepler" -- is expected to be completed in the second half of 2012. The contract includes additional upgrade options beyond those two phases that, if exercised, would increase the total value of the contract.
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