ORNL Lands Third Big Super at the Hands of NOAA

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory will host a third extreme scale supercomputing platform in the coming months.  This time, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] will provide the funding.  The new effort is part of a $215 million climate research agreement between ORNL and NOAA.  By this time next year, ORNL will officially host three petascale platforms.

It’ll be in the same class as Jaguar and Kraken,” Nichols said, referring to the two Cray XT5 systems already housed in the lab’s National Center for Computational Sciences.

No word yet on the specifics beyond the 1PF scale.  No doubt that Cray, IBM, SGI and others are salivating over this one.  NOAA is currently reviewing a draft RFP.  Nichols said in the original article that, given DoE approval, an RFP could be on the street by the end of the month.  NOAA will provide $73 million in Recovery Act money this year that will be used for the purchase.

Read the full article here.