Seattle-based computing company Cray Inc. will be the new vendor for the University’s Blue Waters supercomputing project. After IBM terminated its contract with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, in August, the center began its search for a new computing partner.
The NCSA and Cray have entered into a $188 million contract, according to a NCSA press release Monday. Cray will begin installing hardware in the National Petascale Computing Facility in early 2012, according to its press release.
Trish Barker, spokeswoman for the NCSA, said though the entire project may take the whole of 2012 to implement, a part of Blue Waters could be functional in the first quarter of next year.
“We anticipate having an early version of the supercomputer in early 2014…in the first 3 three to four months,” she said. “We’re hoping the full system will be up and running by late 2012. It will depend on how quickly (Cray is) able to manufacture and get equipment shipped.”
Barker said the contract was signed last week, but the official announcement came Monday at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis in Seattle.
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Blue Waters will consist of more than 250 Cray cabinets, totaling 1.5 petabytes of memory, according to the press release. Cray built the NCSA’s first supercomputers when the center first opened in 1986.
After IBM’s contract termination, the NCSA was charged with restructuring its project, finding a new vendor and present its proposal the National Science Foundation, or NSF, which is funding much of the project.
The NCSA was originally awarded $208 million for the project in 2007 by the NSF. Since then, the NSF has awarded more than $380 million to 41 researchers nationwide who would use the Blue Waters supercomputer for their research projects.
Blue Waters is named for its cooling system—the hundreds of thousands of processors, usually cooled by fans, will be cooled by water. Three on-site cooling towers will provide naturally chilled water for most of the non-summer months.
The National Petascale Computing Facility, or NPCF, at 1725 S. Oak St. was built specifically for house Blue Waters and future computers with water-cooling technology. The NPCF was finished in June 2010.
