NERSC announces acceptance of a Cray XT4 Supercomputer

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Cray today announced the successful completion of the acceptance test of powerful Cray XT4™ system contains nearly 20,000 processor cores and has a top processing speed of more than 100 teraflops.

The next-generation supercomputer will be used to advance a broad range of scientific research. Named “Franklin” in honor of the first internationally recognized American scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the Cray XT4 system enables researchers to tackle the most challenging problems in science by conducting more frequent and increasingly detailed simulations and analyses of massive sets of data.

“With Franklin, we are increasing the computational power available to our 2,900 NERSC users by a factor of six, providing them with access to one of the world’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to open scientific research,” said Michael Strayer, associate director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which funds NERSC. “We have high expectations that NERSC’s proven track record of scientific productivity will provide many new discoveries and understandings.”

Franklin has a theoretical peak speed in excess of 100 teraflops (100 trillion floating point operations per second). In assessing proposed systems, the Cray XT4 scalable architecture promised to deliver high sustained performance, which is critical to NERSC’s 24x7 operation to meet users’ supercomputing demands.

The complete announcement and press release can be found here.