The U.S. government has hired Cray, a company that specializes in building super computers, to build one for it that will help manage the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The $174 million government contract, which amounts to one of the largest that the company has ever been awarded, will be used to build a Cray XC super computer, along with a Cray Sonexion storage system for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA named the entire system “Trinity.” Trinity will be used to keep America’s nuclear arsenal safe, secure, and effective.
Trinity will be a joint effort between elements of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Sandia National Laboratory as part of the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.
“We look forward to working with Cray to create a significant increase in supercomputing capability for key NNSA national security applications,” Bruce Hendrickson, Sr. Manager of the Extreme-scale Computing group at Sandia National Laboratories said. “Trinity will target the largest and most demanding simulations for NNSA.”
Trinity will consist of a next-gen version of the company’s Cray XC system, which will be powered by future Intel Xeon Haswell-based processors, along with future Intel Xeon Phi CPUs code named “Knight’s Landing.” Trinity will be capable of multi-petaflop level performance, 82 petabytes of storage capacity, and 1.7 terabytes per second of “sustained performance.” Trinity will be based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It’s unclear whether Trinity will be used to run the nation’s nuclear arsenal in the event that the weapons should ever need to be deployed in combat situations. It’s also unclear when the NNSA expects Trinity to be up and running.
We have reached out to Cray, and will update this article accordingly if and when we receive any relevant and new information.
