DOE Contracts for Petaflop Supercomputer

by Aliya Sternstein Federal Computer Week, 26 Jun 2006 The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has ordered the first petaflop supercomputing system and an upgrade of its Blue Gene system from Cray. DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the $200 million arrangement last week, with plans for completion of the new supercomputer in 2008. The new system reportedly will attain 1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops), or one petaflop. Oak Ridge scientists plan to use the system to tackle problems in energy, biology, and nanotechnology. The lab also expects to offer computing time to other researchers through a program that grants supercomputer access to academic and corporate institutions. Read more