Cray to Help DOE Build Supercomputer at Berkeley Nat'l Lab Under $146M Contract

Cray has signed a $146M contract with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory™s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to build a supercomputing system intended for large-scale simulations and data analyses.

The Perlmutter supercomputer is designed to help NERSC researchers examine data sets from scientific experiments, the Energy Department said Tuesday.

NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh said the center intends to collaborate with Cray, NVIDIA and AMD in efforts to address computational and data requirements at the facility with the new machine.

“We are also launching a major power and cooling upgrade in Berkeley Lab™s Shyh Wang Hall, home to NERSC, to prepare the facility for Perlmutter,” Dosanjh added.

Cray will provide its Slingshot interconnect to the project while NVIDIA will supply GPUs equipped with Tensor Core, direct liquid cooling and all-flash scratch file technologies.

DOE named the supercomputer for Berkeley Lab astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter. The department expects Cray to deliver the system in 2020.

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