Center to Get $25-Million Cray Computer
The San Diego Supercomputer Center will receive a new $25-million Cray supercomputer in November but has been denied additional funding from the National Science Foundation that would have enabled it to keep its existing, older Cray, which has been in operation since the center opened in 1985.
The new Cray computer, a Y-MP8/864 model, runs on new UNIX-based operating software called UNICOS developed by Minneapolis-based Cray. The center, on the UC San Diego campus, expects the software and the new machine’s added data storage capacity to broaden the machine’s appeal to academic and corporate users.
The supercomputer center will lease the machine from a yet-to-be determined company, paying $6 million to $7 million a year provided by the NSF, center deputy director Chuck Fox said Friday.
Machine Ordered
Financing arrangements with the NSF will not be final for several more weeks, but General Atomics of La Jolla, the research and energy company that runs the research center, has already ordered the new machine, spokeswoman Julie Shisler said. The center’s existing Cray, a model X-MP/48, will be shipped back to Cray at the end of this year.
The supercomputer center had requested $2 million to $3 million more per year from the NSF to keep the older machine. Part of the center’s long-term marketing plan focused on being able to offer users access to a “two-machine environment,” providing added computational capacity and economies of scale, Shisler said.
Because of budgetary constraints, however, money for two machines “is just not there for the NSF centers,” Fox said. San Diego is one of five U.S. supercomputer centers situated on university campuses that are funded principally by the National Science Foundation. Others are in Princeton, N.J., Ithaca, N.Y., Pittsburgh and Urbana-Champaign, Ill.
Not being able to keep the older machine will mean “less computational ability” than the center had planned for, Shisler said. The Cray now on campus is now used 90% by academics and 10% by corporate users.
Millions Short
The San Diego center has fallen short by “$4 million to $5 million” in corporate sponsorships that it had hoped to have generated by now, Shisler said. But the shortfall had no bearing on the center’s inability to keep the second machine, she said.
The supercomputer center initially counted on the private sector to augment its budget and enable it to buy more Cray hardware and software, Shisler said.
Supercomputers such as those manufactured by Cray make calculations on vast amounts of data to perform tasks such as simulating aerodynamic performance, oil field capacity and molecular modeling. The new Cray will have eight times the data storage capacity of the center’s existing model Cray, Fox said Friday.
