On May 20, 2011, Sandia and supercomputer manufacturer Cray announced they had signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) to form an institute focused on data-intensive supercomputers.

The Supercomputing Institute for Learning and Knowledge Systems (SILKS), to be located at Sandia/New Mexico, was expected to leverage the strengths of both Sandia and Cray by making software and hardware resources available to researchers who focus on a relatively new application of supercomputing. The task of such supercomputers is to make sense of huge collections of data rather than the traditional modeling and simulation of scientific problems.

“It’s an unusual opportunity,” says Bruce Hendrickson, Sandia senior manager of computational sciences and math (1440). “Cray has an exciting machine [the XMT] and we know how to use it well. This CRADA should help originate new technologies for efficiently analyzing large data sets. New capabilities will be applicable to Sandia’s fundamental science and mission work.”