Supercomputing Leader Cray Introduces First Exascale-class Supercomputer

Cray (NASDAQ:CRAY), a company that is engaged in supercomputers released a new supercomputing system code-named “Shasta”.

The company said that Shasta is an entirely new design and is set to be technology that frames the next generation of supercomputing.

As quoted in the press release:

With sweeping hardware and software innovations, Shasta incorporates next-generation Cray system software to enable modularity and extensibility, a new Cray-designed system interconnect, unparalleled flexibility in processing choice within a system, and a software environment that provides for seamless scalability. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) also announced today that NERSC, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, has chosen a Cray “Shasta” supercomputer for its NERSC-9 system, named “Perlmutter,” in 2020. The program contract is valued at $146 million, one of the largest in Cray’s history, and will feature a Shasta system with Cray® ClusterStor™ storage.

“Shasta will usher in a new era of supercomputing and represents a true game-changer at a time when artificial intelligence and analytics are being brought to bear on increasingly large and complex problems, including classic HPC modeling and simulation challenges, across an ever-broadening set of companies and industries,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “It is also very exciting to announce that one of the largest contracts in the history of our company was just signed with NERSC. We are honored to continue our partnership with NERSC and put Shasta to work in support of their broad mission to enable computational and data science at scale.”

With Shasta, Cray is also announcing Slingshot, a new high-speed, purpose-built supercomputing interconnect. Slingshot advances Cray’s industry leadership in scalable network performance and adds capabilities that broaden Cray’s market reach. The Cray-developed Slingshot interconnect will have up to 5x more bandwidth per node and is designed for data-centric computing. Slingshot will feature Ethernet compatibility, advanced adaptive routing, first-of-a-kind congestion control, and sophisticated quality-of-service capabilities. Support for both IP-routed and remote memory operations will broaden the range of applications beyond traditional modeling and simulation. Quality-of-service and novel congestion management features will limit the impact to critical workloads from system services, I/O traffic, and co-tenant workloads, to increase realized performance and limit performance variation. Reduction in the network diameter from five hops (in the current Cray® XC™ generation) to three will reduce latency and power while improving sustained bandwidth and reliability.

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