Raytheon wins $34 million contract to upgrade supercomputer laboratoryUpper Marlboro 26 Oct 2000 Raytheon Company has been awarded a $34 million contract to upgrade the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) supercomputer laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. The upgrade is expected to improve the USA's climate prediction and weather forecasting capabilities.
GFDL is a federal research laboratory in the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric
Research, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The laboratory performs comprehensive, long
lead-time research that is fundamental to the mission of NOAA.
One of the goals of this research is to expand the scientific understanding of
the physical processes governing the behaviour of the atmosphere and the oceans
as complex fluid systems. These systems can be modelled mathematically and their
phenomenology can be studied by complex computer simulations. Using this
information can improve climate prediction and weather forecasting. GFDL is one
of the USA's foremost computer laboratories concentrating primarily on the
modelling of hurricanes and other large-scale weather phenomena.
Initial delivery consists of nine SGI Origin 3800 supercomputers each with 128
processors. The new computers will have the ability to perform more than 900
billion floating point arithmetic operations per second (900 Gigaflops) and will
have more than four times the performance of the three Cray Research computers
that they replace.
SGI, a key subcontractor on the GFDL team, recently launched its new Origin 3000
series servers. Available immediately, the systems are based on the breakthrough
SGI NUMAflex modular technology, and offer flexibility, resiliency, overall
investment protection and superior performance, according to Jan Silverman, vice
president, SGI Advanced Systems Marketing. The SGI NUMAflex modular
technology is a "brick"-style system for constructing small-to-very large
computer systems from a common set of building blocks.
Financing for the project is being provided by SGI Solutions Finance.
The system also includes more than 20 terabytes of high-speed disk storage that
can transfer data in or out of the system at more than 10 gigabytes per second.
Raytheon will also, as part of the contract, upgrade an existing automated tape
archive storage system. Initial capacity of the tape archive will be
approximately 500 terabytes.
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