UK Atomic Weapons Acquired Cray Shasta With ClusterStor Lustre Storage

Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced that the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has selected its Shasta HPC to support security and defence of the UK.

The Shasta system, purpose-built for the exascale era, was chosen due to its ability to run mixed workloads and applications at the best TCO for a system across 5 years.

AWE’s HPC, named Vulcan, will feature a single Shasta HPC with expected performance of more than 7 petaflops. It will play an integral role in maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

“High-performance computing is a critical aspect of AWE,” said Andy Herdman, head of HPC, AWE. “It underpins the vast majority of our science-based programs, and we’re continually looking for ways to enhance and support this important work. This is why we chose Shasta, for its unique and powerful features, as well as its ability to provide optimal TCO.“

The UK Ministry of Defence is responsible for the program and stewardship of AWE, which is operated under contract by AWE Management Limited. The Establishment has been at the forefront of UK nuclear deterrence for more than 60 years. Predicated on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which prohibits emission of nuclear yield, AWE must continually verify the safety and reliability of nuclear warheads through science-based and computational programming. Shasta will further extend AWE’s scientific and technological capabilities.

“We are incredibly proud to be chosen by AWE to support their important mission,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO, Cray. “Shasta will bring Exascale Era technologies to bear on AWE’s challenging modeling and simulation data-intensive workload and enable the convergence of AI and analytics into this same workload, on a single system.“

Vulcan’s Shasta architecture will include the Cray Slingshot interconnect, AMD EPYC 7542 processors and Cray ClusterStor Lustre storage. The storage system will offer nearly 100GB/s of I/O performance.

“We are pleased to once again partner with Cray to deliver a powerful new HPC that will support critical research efforts in the UK,” said Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM, AMD datacenter and embedded systems group. “Our 2nd gen AMD EPYC processors provide unprecedented performance while helping to reduce TCO, key elements for driving success for AWE in the coming years.“