The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has awarded Seattle-based supercomputer maker Cray a $174 million contract to develop a new machine to manage nuclear weapons.

Dubbed Trinity, the supercomputer is expected to be one of the fastest in the world. It will be installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and used to "ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear stockpile," Cray said in a statement.

Trinity will be a joint effort between the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories as part of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.

Cray said the machine will run applications eight times faster than its existing "Cielo" supercomputer installed at Los Alamos, which boasts a speed of 1.37 petaflops. Cray is planning to outfit Trinity with future-generation Intel Haswell and Knights Landing processors; Cielo uses chips from Advanced Micro Devices. Trinity will include 82 petabyes of storage.

"The NNSA has consistently deployed the world's most advanced supercomputing systems to support their critical mission of ensuring the health of our nation's nuclear stockpile," Cray president and CEO Peter Ungaro said in a statement. "We couldn't be more proud that, once again, the NNSA has placed its trust in Cray to provide them with the computational tools needed to support their important mission."

Trinity is on set to be delivered in mid-2015.

For more, see Supercomputing Tech Marches On, Top500 List Largely Unchanged.

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