Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY) has received a potential $600M contract from the Department of Energy to develop an artificial intelligence-based computing machine that can offer analytics and machine learning for national security, energy, healthcare and manufacturing applications.DOE said Tuesday it expects the “Frontier” supercomputer to roll out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory by 2021 and process quintillion of calculations per second at a performance capacity of 1.5 exaflops.
The exascale system will employ Cray’s Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect network as well as Advanced Micro Devices’ GPU technology that will aid in pattern recognition and simulation development beyond traditional methods.
Cray and the Santa Clara, Calif.-based semiconductor provider are slated to jointly develop GPU tools to support programming functions for the supercomputer.
“Frontier will incorporate foundational new technologies from Cray and AMD that will enable the new exascale era — characterized by data-intensive workloads and the convergence of modeling, simulation, analytics, and AI for scientific discovery, engineering and digital transformation.†said Peter Ungaro, Cray’s president and CEO.
DOE researchers for the Exascale Computing Project are developing scientific applications through ORNL’s Summit supercomputer and will migrate the exascale applications to Frontier once the system is deployed.
