Cray to Offer Kepler Cards for Cascade Supercomputer

Cray is the first supercomputer maker we know of to officially adopt Nvidia's Kepler architecture.

The company said that its next-generation supercomputer code-named Cascade will be available with Nvidia's Tesla cards based on Kepler GPUs.

Cascade will also be offering Intel's Xeon Phi coprocessors as an option. The supercomputer design is scheduled to be released in 2013 and promises "major advancements" to the Cray Linux Environment as well as to the Aries interconnect chipset.

So far, Cray has five contracts to supply a cascade system. The university of Stuttgart has ordered a system for the High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS), the Kyoto University has ordered Cascade for the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACMS) and another purchase came from the Finnish IT Center for Science Ltd. (CSC).

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) recently signed a $21 million agreement for a Cascade system for the Pawsey Centre in Perth, Australia and the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley has invested $40 million into a future Cray supercomputer.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

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