Cray Delivers First Third of the Franklin XT4 System to NERSC

January 16, 2007

On Tuesday, January 16, 2007, NERSC received the first installment of its new Cray XT4 supercomputer. Although a test system had been delivered the previous fall, the delivery of 36 cabinets (including 3,336 computational dual core nodes) marks the start of the installation of the full system, which is expected to go into production this summer.

Named “Franklin” after Benjamin Franklin, America’s first scientist, the Cray XT4 will consist of more than 19,000, processor cores when fully installed. It will deliver sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second, with a theoretical peak speed of more than 100 teraflop/s. Franklin the computer was powered up for the first time on January 17, thus celebrating its birthday with Benjamin Franklin, who was born January 17, 1706.

“Franklin, the world's largest XT4 system, represents 10 times more computing power than any other NERSC system,” said Bill Kramer, NERSC’s general manager. “We are extremely pleased to be able to make such a significant addition to the resources our computational scientists use.”

Assembled and shipped from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the cabinets feature a distinctive blue and gold color scheme reflecting their new home in Berkeley.

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High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.