Supercomputer maker Cray announced that it has entered into a contract worth $174 million with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). As per the contract, Cray has to supply a supercomputer that will manage the US nuclear stockpile.

The supercomputer dubbed Trinity will help maintain the safety of the US nuclear arsenal. The new supercomputer, which is to be installed at Los Alamos, will support all three of the NNSA national laboratories. The three facilities are Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Currently, NNSA is using a supercomputer designed by Cray located at Los Alamos. It is named as Cielo. Trinity is expected to deliver performance of over eight times better applications than Cielo system. It will be based on Intel Xeon Haswell processors. Trinity will have storage system starting at 82 PB of capacity.

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, is quite happy that they have received the contract, which is one of the largest contracts in company's history. "Our partnership and collaboration with the NNSA has led to the development of groundbreaking supercomputing systems, including the Cray XT3 system that resulted from the Red Storm project", affirmed Ungaro.

The contract is said to have multiple phases and will take many years to complete and continue through at least 2016. The NNSA has not announced any tentative date when it thinks that Trinity will complete and starts working.

Trinity is a joint project between the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories as part of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC).