Cray-ons all choked up.
Cray has been on a tear lately, announcing two $40M+ deals in the past couple months (DoD and DoE) along with a few other signficant buys. Today they’ve announced a purchase by NCAR that they are evidently pretty stoked about
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that after an eight-year hiatus, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has become a Cray customer once again with an order for a Cray XT5m supercomputing system. NCAR purchased the world’s first production Cray-1A supercomputer in 1976, and continued to perform scientific research on various Cray supercomputing systems for more than 25 years.
An XT5m isn’t exactly leadership-scale stuff, but I guess its an emotional victory for the company. In fact, given the company’s usual functional but reserved press releases, I’d say that Seattle is downright giddy about the deal.
NCAR’s new Cray XT5m midrange supercomputer, nicknamed “Lynx,” will be installed in NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) in Boulder, Colorado later this month. “Lynx” will be used primarily as a development and test platform for CISL and NCAR users who also have access to larger Cray XT supercomputers located at other institutions, including the petascale “Jaguar” and “Kraken” Cray XT5 systems housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “Franklin” Cray XT4 system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
…”NCAR has long been a world leader in the atmospheric sciences and in leveraging supercomputers to advance scientific capabilities in this field,” said Per Nyberg, Cray’s director of marketing for the Earth Sciences segment. “Cray supercomputers are found in some the most prestigious weather and climate research centers around the world and we are proud to have NCAR as a Cray customer once again.”
Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register provides a little background on the sturm und drang surrounding this announcement, most of which you probably already know.
