APPLICATIONS

Upgrade Will Boost Computing Power to Almost 23 Teraflops for Scientific Breakthroughs and International Collaborations: The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), which put Europe's first Cray XT3 supercomputer into production in January 2006, has signed an agreement with Cray to upgrade the system in order to meet growing demand for advanced scientific research and higher-resolution weather forecasts. As previously announced, CSCS plans to use the system next year to run next-generation weather forecasts with two-kilometer resolution for MeteoSwiss. This will make Switzerland one of the first countries in Europe to move from the current standard forecast resolution of seven kilometers to the more accurate two-kilometer resolution. In addition, the upgraded Cray supercomputer will be used to support Switzerland's scientific research community in disciplines including chemistry, engineering sciences, environmental science, life science, materials science, physics and other fields. "We look forward to helping produce more detailed weather forecasts for Switzerland's Alpine topography for the first time," according to CSCS co-Director Dr. Marie-Christine Sawley. "In addition, the enhanced performance of the Cray supercomputer will enable Swiss researchers to continue achieving important scientific breakthroughs and will also make CSCS an attractive partner for high-value, high-profile collaborations within Europe and beyond." The supercomputer's peak performance will nearly triple from the current 8.5 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) to an aggregate 22.8 teraflops. This upgrade will make the CSCS system one of the most powerful installations in the world. The supercomputer upgrade will happen in two phases. In the first phase, the centre's Cray XT3 supercomputer will be upgraded with dual-core AMD Opteron processors. In the second phase, a fully compatible Cray XT4 supercomputer will be added to the system. "We are very excited about CSCS' decision to upgrade their Cray supercomputer a second time in less than a year. This is in direct response to the huge demand of scientific users for this system and all the new possibilities it has opened up for scientific research in Switzerland," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "With this upgrade and the large-scale usage of the system, CSCS will be one of the most advanced centres in Europe that are committed to enabling true capability computing."