Tag: Cray

Cray gets nukes

Posted on November 6, 2019 by - News

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.

Met Office spends £100 million on computer

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

metcrayStung by criticism that its weather forecasts aren’t quite as accurate as they could be, the UK Met Office has decided the answer to the whingers is to buy a supercomputer that cost it £97 million.

How will the Cray supercomputer help?  The Met Office helpfully explains that it’s 13 times more powerful than the current system and has 120,000 times more memory than a top end smartphone.

That means it can deliver incorrect forecasts 13 times faster than it does now.

Of course, it’s all in the software or as the Met Office explains “sophisticated forecasts are anticipated to deliver £2 billion of socio economic benefits to the UK”.

Politician Danny Alexander, who is chief secretary to the Treasury,  said: “We are a country fascinated by the weather.”

The supercomputer is based at the Exeter Science Park and the Met Office says it weighs the equivalent of 11 double decker buses.

But we’ll have to wait nearly a year before the 16,000 trillion calculations a second supercomputer grinds into action.  The first phase will be operational in September 2015 and it won’t reach full capacity until 2017.

Ulrika ? Those were the Crays

Posted on October 17, 2014 by - News

crayCray has just built a machine with 1,500 cores, 6TB of DRAM, 38TB of SSD flash and 120TB of disk storage and named it after a Swedish weather girl from the 1990s.

Actually we are not sure if there is any link between Gladiators’ star Ulrika Jonsson and Crays’ latest supercomputer but she has not been in the news lately so we thought we would help her out.

Rather than a B list celebrity, the Ulrika XA is what is known as a single-platform entity, which mixes a range of analytic workloads that needed separate systems.

Cray said that its design has been optimised for compute and memory-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads.

Urika-XA as a turnkey, scale-out, analytics appliance and is designed for “extreme analytics” (hence XA) and described as a “pre-integrated, open platform for high-performance big data analytics”.

A single Urika-XA rack features 48 Intel Xeon compute nodes with an 800gig SSD per node, 200TB of SDD and disk storage using Sonexion 900 array, InfiniBand, Lustre parallel file system, HDFS-compatibility and POSIX compliance.

It is based around a SW stack with Cloudera Enterprise, Apache Spark, Cray Adaptive Runtime for Hadoop and Urika-XA management system.

The first buyer is the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab where ironically it will be looking at the impact of the weather.

The Cray says it’s coming from supercomputing land with “battle-hardened” technology which we would have thought should be “Gladiator hardened” and jolly useful when you are trying to have an affair with an English football coach without the tabloids finding out.