INDUSTRY

Cray Inc. announced that Germany's Research Center Juelich (FZJ) has selected a Cray XD1 supercomputer for advanced scientific research and to evaluate its potential as a future leadership-class system. A 72-processor system with peak performance of 317 billion calculations per second (gigaflops) will be installed later this month at FZJ's Central Institute for Applied Mathematics facility in Juelich, Germany. The Cray XD1 system will support advanced research across a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, including system biology, astrophysics and material science. FZJ will also evaluate the Cray XD1 system as an FPGA-based heterogeneous computing platform. Thomas Lippert, director of the Central Institute for Applied Mathematics, said, "We are impressed with the new Cray XD1 supercomputer. We look forward to making it available to our user community and to assessing its potential to meet our large-scale computing needs. Cray has been a trusted partner of ours for two decades." "We are pleased to be augmenting the long-term relationship between FZJ and Cray, which dates back to the installation of a Cray X-MP system in 1984. FZJ has a sterling reputation for scientific leadership in Germany and around the world," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "With the Cray XD1 system, FZJ researchers will be able to access a Cray high performance system of the latest generation." The new Cray XD1 high-bandwidth supercomputer has had strong market momentum since the product began shipping to Europe in November 2004. Recently announced orders include Helmut Schmidt University and Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB). The Cray XD1 system is rapidly winning cluster converts worldwide for its ability to provide superior application performance to HPC users needing smaller, yet high bandwidth HPC systems. Together, the Cray XD1 supercomputer, the recently announced, Red Storm-based Cray XT3 massively parallel supercomputer, and the Cray X1 system constitute the world's most comprehensive and capable lineup of high performance computing (HPC) products.