Global supercomputer leader Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced that the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has selected the Cray Shasta supercomputer to look after its nukes.
The Shasta system, purpose-built for the exascale era, was chosen due to its ability to run mixed workloads and applications at the best total cost of ownership (TCO) for a system across five years.
AWE’s supercomputer, named Vulcan, will feature a single Shasta supercomputer with a performance of more than 7 petaflops. Shasta will play an integral role in maintaining the UK’s nukes.
AWE HPC head Andy Herdman said: “It underpins the vast majority of our science-based programs, and we’re continually looking for ways to enhance and support this important work. This is why we chose Shasta, for its unique and powerful features, as well as its ability to provide optimal TCO.”
The UK Ministry of Defence is responsible for the programme and “stewardship” of AWE, which is operated under contract by AWE Management Limited. The Establishment has been at the forefront of UK nuclear deterrence for more than 60 years. Predicated on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which prohibits the emission of nuclear yield, AWE must verify the safety and reliability of nuclear warheads through science-based and computational programming. Shasta will further extend AWE’s sophisticated scientific and technological capabilities.
Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro said: “We are incredibly proud to be chosen by AWE to support their important mission. Shasta will bring Exascale Era technologies to bear on AWE’s challenging modelling and simulation data-intensive workload and enable the convergence of AI and analytics into this same workload, on a single system.”
Vulcan’s Shasta architecture will include the Cray Slingshot interconnect, AMD EPYC 7542 processors and Cray ClusterStor Lustre storage. The high-performance storage system will offer nearly 100 gigabytes per second of I/O performance.
