Cray Reinvents Itself Again and Will Build a Second DOE Exascale System

Taiwan-based TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, recently announced (https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332869) that high performance computing (HPC) has supplanted smart phones as the most important driver of its business, although presumably not yet the largest financially.

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.