ENGINEERING

Cray announced it has been awarded a $39 million contract from the North-German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) to deliver a distributed Cray XC30 supercomputing system. HLRN is an alliance amongst seven states in Northern Germany and the new supercomputer will be operated from the Zuse Institute Berlin and Lebniz University in Hannover. At these two sites the Cray XC30 will act as one combined system, providing universities and research centers in the northern states of Germany with a powerful petascale computing resource.

“Researchers in Northern Germany will soon benefit from a significant increase in computing power as a result of procuring the new HLRN-III system from Cray,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas Rung, head of the Scientific Board of the HLRN. “The Cray XC30 offers a flexible computing architecture that will fulfill our need for advanced supercomputing technologies now and into the future. This is an exciting moment for the scientific community across the northern states of Germany.”

Previously code-named Cascade, the Cray XC30 features the new HPC-optimized Aries system interconnect, a new Dragonfly topology that frees applications from locality constraints, and the ability to incorporate a variety of processor types including the Intel Xeon processors. The multi-phase $39 million contract will have the majority of the system  delivered and put into production in 2013.