Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories have formed a new HPC center called The Alliance for Computing at the Extreme Scale (ACES). This collaboration calls for the two labs to jointly architect, develop, procure and operate capability systems for DOE’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC), according to a paper presented at the 2010 Cray User Group meeting this past month.

The authors state that the Cray-ACES collaborative effort will focus on a ‘potential’ interconnect refered to as the Pisces Interconnect. Pisces is not currently on Cray’s roadmap. The Los Alamos and Sandia collaboration will help to analyze potential capabilities for Cray to include in Pisces hoping to achieve significant performance impact on a suite of ASC applications.

The Pisces interconnect would be Cray’s 4th generation network interconnect and would likely be available in commercial systems in the 2015 timeframe.