Cray has been awarded a roughly $70 million contract to provide a next-generation Cray XC supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), named “Cori” after bio-chemist and Nobel Laureate Gerty Cori.

The Cori system to be installed at NERSC will be a future-generation version of the Cray XC30 supercomputer and will feature the next-generation of the Intel Xeon Phi processor code-named Knights Landing.  Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at more than $70 million, and the system is expected to be delivered in 2016.  As part of this contract, the next-generation Cray XC supercomputer will also include a 400 gigabytes per-second, 28-petabyte Cray Lustre File System storage solution. Additionally, NERSC has the option to purchase solid state storage integrated in the Cray XC supercomputer for extremely high performance burst IO.

NERSC is also home to a Cray XC30 supercomputer named Edison  and a Cray XE6 supercomputer named Hopper.  The new Cori system is expected to deliver 10 times the sustained computing capability of the Hopper supercomputer.

NERSC supports more than 5,000 scientists annually on more than 700 projects in the areas of climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, and chemistry,  among other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets.

[Image courtesy: NERSC]