Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., a leader in earth, atmosphere and space science R&D, and Cray, announced today they are collaborating to offer a highly affordable solution that provides local forecast information for a variety of uses that is scalable, flexible, entirely customizable and delivered on the award-winning Cray XD1 supercomputer. The combination of AER's advanced science and Cray's powerful supercomputers offers an end-to-end solution for addressing the local forecasting and alerting needs of organizations constrained by modest or limited budgets. The AER software is based on science and technology originally developed to support severe weather forecasting for the Athens Olympics. The Cray XD1 supercomputer's scalability for meeting high-performance processing requirements, and AER's nCast software architecture with unique storm advection and visualization capabilities, complement each other, benefiting the customer and delivering valuable environmental information as web-based graphics for mission-critical uses. "We are enthusiastic about the potential of our modeling and alerting capabilities on the Cray platform. The AER-Cray solution is very well suited to deliver exceptional results for a broad range of users," said Cecilia Sze, AER's President and CEO. "AER's advanced science has resulted in an application that offers the same flexibility and scalability supported by our hardware, and leverages the benefits of Cray's superior price/performance metrics. Forecasting severe weather with tools such as these has relevance worldwide," stated Per Nyberg, Cray's Earth Sciences Business Manager. nCast is a local weather software package that is easily tailored to meet very specific needs. It provides localized model forecast elements such as temperatures, winds, pressure and precipitation, to assist in weather forecasting, scientific research or operational support. AER provides web-based graphical products as well as GRIB products, installation and model training, and support and maintenance packages. Optional features include automated alerting, key forecast indices and cloud or precipitation advection models. The Cray XD1 supercomputer combines direct-connect system architecture, high-performance computing (HPC)-optimized Linux, management and reconfigurable computing technologies to deliver exceptional performance on real-world applications. Purpose-built for demanding HPC applications such as computational chemistry, environmental forecasting and CAE, the Cray XD1 system lets users simulate, analyze and solve complex problems more quickly and accurately. The x86-based Cray XD1 system supports a broad range of 32- and 64-bit HPC applications on AMD Opteron single- or dual-core processors. The Cray XD1 system also provides application acceleration capabilities using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology tightly connected to the direct-connect structure.