Cray Inc. announced that the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has selected the Cray Shastaä supercomputer to support security and defence of the U.K. The Shasta system, purpose-built for the exascale era, was chosen due to its ability to run mixed workloads and applications at the best total cost of ownership (TCO) for a system across five years. The U.K. 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 U.K. 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 sophisticated scientific and technological capabilities. Vulcan’s Shasta architecture will include the Cray Slingshot interconnect, AMD EPYCä 7542 processors and Cray ClusterStor Lustre storage. The high performance storage system will offer nearly 100 gigabytes per second of I/O performance.