Meet Cori: The $70 Million Next Gen Supercomputer for the Day job @ NERSC

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center and Cray Inc. announced today that they have signed a contract for a next generation of supercomputer to enable scientific discovery at the DOE’s Office of Science (DOE SC).

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which manages NERSC, collaborated with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories to develop the technical requirements for the system.

The new, next-generation Cray XC supercomputer will use Intel’s next-generation Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor –- code-named “Knights Landing” -- a self-hosted, manycore processor with on-package high bandwidth memory and delivers more than 3 teraFLOPS of double-precision peak performance per single socket node. Scheduled for delivery in mid-2016, the new system will deliver 10x the sustained computing capability of NERSC’s Hopper system, a Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC serves as the DOE SC’s primary high performance computing (HPC) facility, supporting more than 5,000 scientists annually on over 700 projects. The $70 million plus contract represents the DOE SC’s ongoing commitment to enabling extreme-scale science to address challenges such as developing new energy sources, improving energy efficiency, understanding climate change, developing new materials and analyzing massive data sets from experimental facilities around the world.

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To highlight its commitment to advancing research, NERSC names its supercomputers after noted scientists. The new system will be named “Cori” in honor of bio-chemist and Nobel Laureate Gerty Cori, the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.

Technical Highlights

Cori the supercomputer will have over 9300 Knights Landing compute nodes and provide over 400 gigabytes per second of I/O bandwidth and 28 petabytes of disk space. The contract also includes an option for a “Burst Buffer,” a layer of NVRAM that would move data more quickly between processor and disk, allowing users to make the most efficient use of the system while saving energy. The Cray XC system features the Aries high-performance interconnect linking the processors, which also increases efficiency. Cori will be installed directly into the new Computational Research and Theory facility currently being constructed on the main Berkeley Lab campus.

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