The Palomar-QUEST survey, a collaborative venture between the California Institute of Technology, Yale University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Indiana University, will explore the universe from our solar system out to the most distant quasars, more than 10 billion light-years away. CACR is providing data warehousing for the survey, and building the archive and database with NVO standards.
Cray Inc. Signs $49.9 Million A greement for Second Phase of DARPA Petaflops Computing Systems Program.
Cray Inc. today announced that it, together with New Technology Endeavors, Inc. , have signed an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in the second phase of DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems Program. The program will provide Cray and its university research partners with $49.9 million in additional funding over the next three years to support an advanced research program aimed at developing a commercially available system capable of sustained performance in excess of one petaflops (a million billion calculations per second).
Ed Upchurch as Caltech/JPL ‘ s Principal Investigator leads the team and Thomas Sterling is Chief Technologist . Other research partners include Stanford University and The University of Notre Dame , and the Principal Investigator of the project is Cray’s chief scientist, Burton Smith . “The DARPA HPCS program in general and the Cray Cascade Petaflops computer project in particular is an important opportunity for Caltech and JPL to directly, significantly, and substantively influence the direction of future supercomputer systems architecture and software ,” Sterling says. ” Through this program, innovative concepts developed by scientists at Caltech and JPL, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in the field of advanced PIM architecture will be developed and transferred to real world end users from academic research through this industrial partnership. The result may be little less than the next revolution in supercomputing.”
DARPA formed the High Productivity Computing Systems Program to foster development of the next generation of high productivity computing systems for both the national security and industrial user communities. Program goals are for these systems to be more broadly applicable, much easier to program and more resistant to failure than currently available high performance computing systems.
Five computer-makers, including Cray, were selected for the first phase concept study that was initiated in mid-2002, and all five firms submitted proposals for the second phase. Cray, along with IBM and Sun Microsystems, were selected to continue to the second phase, where further definition and validation of the proposed systems will occur. In mid-2006, DARPA plans to select up to two vendors for the final phase, a full-scale development phase with initial prototype deliveries scheduled for 2010.
More information about the Cascade project can be found at http://www.cray.com/cascade/ .
