The systems and multi-year services contract includes delivery of a Cray massively parallel processor supercomputer, code-named Hood, and provides options for future upgrades that would quadruple the size of the system and eventually boost performance to one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating point operations per second) and beyond.
Hood is projected to deliver sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second—with a theoretical peak speed of 100 trillion calculations per second—when running a suite of diverse scientific applications at scale. The system uses thousands of AMD Opteron processors running tuned, lightweight operating system kernels and interfaced to Cray's SeaStar network.
Cray (Seattle, Wash.) will begin shipping the supercomputer to the NERSC facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory later this year, with completion of the installation anticipated the first half of 2007 and acceptance in mid-2007.