NNSA Selects Cray to Build Next Production Capability Computing Platform

On April 1, 2010, NNSA announced that Cray Inc. had been awarded the contract to build Cielo (Spanish for sky), NNSA’s next-generation capability computing platform. Design, procurement, and deployment were accomplished by the NNSA’s New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES), a joint partnership between Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. The new platform will be installed at LANL in the third quarter of 2010 and will also support ASC programs at all three NNSA national laboratories. Cielo will initially provide more than 1 peak petaFLOPS, 10 times the capability of the ASC Purple system, soon to be retired at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Additional nodes are scheduled to be added in 2011.

The Cielo system will target extremely large national security modeling and simulation problems, many of which will require most of the nodes on Cielo for a single simulation.

To prepare for the Cielo arrival, the LANL Nicholas Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation recently underwent a $15.2M project to upgrade the power and cooling to support the combined needs of Roadrunner, Cielo, and future extreme-scale supercomputing systems. Consisting of 72 cabinets using less than 1500 sq. ft., Cielo is targeted to use less than 4 megawatts of power for operation.

The Cielo principals are NNSA Federal Project Director Sander Lee, HQ; ACES Co-Directors Sudip Dosanjh, SNL, and John Morrison, LANL; Project Director Manuel Vigil, LANL; Chief Architect Doug Doerfler, SNL; ASC Executive Julia Phillips, SNL, and LANL ASC Program Director, Cheryl Wampler.