Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to Double Performance on Its

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to Double Performance on Its

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) will double the capacity of its 10-teraflops (10 trillion floating point operations per second) Cray XT3(TM) system to over 21 teraflops by the end of this year. Nicknamed “BigBen,” PSC’s system was the first Cray XT3 supercomputer to be installed and became the leading performer among tightly coupled supercomputer architectures on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid computing infrastructure. The upgrade is expected to significantly boost the TeraGrid’s ability to support the most demanding, large-scale scientific applications — known as “capability” computing. PSC will replace the single-core AMD Opteron(TM) processors in BigBen with dual-core Opteron processors, boosting peak performance and also increasing system memory from two to four terabytes. Dual-core technology fits two processor cores on a single die to double processing capacity with minimal impact on power consumption and heat levels.

“The Cray XT3 system has proven itself as a massively parallel platform of exceptional capability,” said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. “In the first year since becoming a production resource, BigBen has made possible a number of remarkable achievements. In fact, the system has been in such demand among scientists that it is now the most oversubscribed computing resource on the TeraGrid. We look forward to more new insights into important scientific problems as a result of this upgrade.”

“The Cray XT3 supercomputer has been designed to use innovative packaging technology that allows customers to upgrade their systems cost-effectively,” said Peter Ungaro, Cray president and CEO. “This upgrade will increase both the performance and capability of BigBen, lowering total cost of ownership by extending the system’s productive life. This will make it even more valuable to PSC and scientific research groups throughout the country.”

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