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NERSC’s $70 Million Cray Contract Bought the Cori Supercomputer

NERSC announced a “$70 million plus” Cray contract for Cori in 2014. The system served DOE scientific research and is distinct from the later Perlmutter procurement.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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On April 29, 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) announced a “$70 million plus” contract with Cray Inc. for a next-generation supercomputer called Cori. The award funded specialized scientific-computing infrastructure for DOE research, not a consumer computer or a general-purpose technology purchase. NERSC’s 2014 announcement

What the contract was for

NERSC is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and serves the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. In its 2014 announcement, the center described itself as the Office of Science’s primary high-performance computing facility and said it served more than 5,000 scientists annually across over 700 projects. The planned Cori system was intended to support research on energy sources and efficiency, climate change, new materials, and large data sets produced by experimental facilities. NERSC’s 2014 announcement

The announcement named Cori as a Cray XC system built around Intel’s then-next-generation Xeon Phi processor, code-named Knights Landing. NERSC described Knights Landing as a self-hosted many-core processor. The procurement was therefore a major research-infrastructure investment: processors, compute nodes, data movement, and storage designed for scientific workloads.

What NERSC said Cori would include

The following were planned specifications in the April 2014 contract announcement, not a verified inventory of the system as ultimately delivered:

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  • More than 9,300 compute nodes.
  • More than 400 GB/s of I/O bandwidth.
  • 28 PB of disk capacity.
  • An option for a burst buffer: a layer of non-volatile memory intended to move data more quickly between processors and disk.

NERSC projected delivery in mid-2016 and said Cori would provide ten times the sustained computing capability of its Hopper system. Those were forward-looking statements in the announcement; they should not be mistaken for a later measured comparison. NERSC subsequently reported that Cori debuted in 2017. 2014 announcement; NERSC’s Cori retrospective

What Cori became

NERSC’s later retrospective describes Cori as a Cray XC40 with 2,388 Intel Xeon Haswell processor nodes and 9,688 Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing nodes. It reports a 1.8 PB Cray DataWarp burst buffer and approximately 30 petaflops of peak performance. Cori ranked fifth on the TOP500 list when it debuted in 2017 and was retired at the end of May after nearly seven years of service. These retrospective figures describe the system NERSC operated; they are distinct from the 2014 announcement’s projections. NERSC’s Cori retrospective

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NERSC also notes that Cori’s many-core architecture influenced its user programs, including the NERSC Exascale Science Applications Program. That is institutional context about how the center worked with many-core computing, not evidence that the contract by itself caused later program results. NERSC’s Cori retrospective

Cori was not the later Perlmutter contract

NERSC’s Cori award is sometimes easy to confuse with a later Cray procurement. In October 2018, the Department of Energy announced a separate $146 million contract for Perlmutter, a pre-exascale system; that value included multiple years of service and support. Perlmutter was not Cori, and its contract amount should not be attributed to the 2014 award. DOE’s 2018 Perlmutter announcement

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  • Reverse (Tails): The iconic cylindrical form of the Cray-1 supercomputer takes center stage - its distinctive C-shaped bench seating and stacked circuit modules rendered in striking numismatic detail. The design pays tribute to Seymour Cray's revolutionary engineering vision and the Wisconsin facility where the future of computing was born.
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Procurement Announcement and value System and scope Schedule or status established here
Cori April 29, 2014; “$70 million plus,” as stated by NERSC. NERSC Cray XC system planned with Knights Landing; later retrospective identifies a Cray XC40. NERSC announcement; retrospective Mid-2016 delivery was the announced schedule; NERSC later says Cori debuted in 2017 and was retired at the end of May after nearly seven years. NERSC announcement; retrospective
Perlmutter October 2018; $146 million, according to DOE, including multiple years of service and support. DOE Separate pre-exascale system procurement. DOE Not stated in the cited DOE announcement details summarized here.
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Why the contract mattered beyond its price

Cori’s importance was not just its headline contract value. The announced design combined conventional Xeon processor nodes with many-core Knights Landing nodes and planned a high-bandwidth data path and substantial storage. NERSC’s later account shows the delivered system included both Haswell and Knights Landing nodes and a DataWarp burst buffer, while its many-core architecture shaped aspects of the center’s user support and programming efforts. The contract was a public investment in computing capacity for scientific research, with the system serving DOE researchers rather than a retail market. NERSC’s 2014 announcement; NERSC’s Cori retrospective

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