GOVERNMENT

Cray Inc. and the University of Bergen today announced that the university will acquire one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers. The contract calls for a Cray XT4; supercomputer system with peak performance of 50 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) to be installed later this year at the Bergen Center for Computational Science (BCCS). The supercomputer will be used for advanced research in fields including marine molecular biology, large scale simulation of ocean processes, climate research, computational chemistry, computational physics, computational biology, the geosciences, and applied mathematics. "The new Cray supercomputer will increase the computational power available to our broad community of Norwegian and international users by a factor of 100 and will enable them to run much larger and more complex problems," said Professor Petter E. Bjørstad, director of the Bergen Center for Computational Science. "The University of Bergen has strategic research initiatives within marine sciences, climate and life sciences that will benefit enormously from this decision." Through the BCCS, the Cray XT4 supercomputer will serve the high-end computational needs of scientists at the University of Bergen, other Norwegian universities as well as national research and industrial organizations. The new supercomputer will also be used for research and development by international organizations, European research groups and research projects, and cooperating scientists from international institutions. "We are honored that the University of Bergen chose Cray as their partner to provide very high-end computing capability to support the university's extended research community," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's president and CEO. "This decision strengthens our international presence and fortifies the Cray XT4 supercomputer's leadership in meeting the demanding needs of leading-edge scientific researchers for unrivaled performance and scalability." "The University of Bergen award is another major victory that increases Cray's presence in Europe," said Ulla Thiel, Cray Vice President Europe. "We are very excited about this win and look forward to a close collaboration with the University of Bergen to make this supercomputer installation a joint success of BCCS and Cray." The project is funded by the University of Bergen in partnership with the Norwegian Research Council through the NOTUR project, the Institute for Marine Research, and UNIFOB AS.