SCIENCE

Cray, AMD and CSC, the Finnish IT center for science, today announced a University Grant Program that will give students and young researchers in Finland access to the new Cray XT4 supercomputer installed at CSC. Grant recipients will be able to leverage the immense computing power provided by the 70-teraflops (70 trillion floating point operations per second) system to develop new computational methods, software and tools that can be used to solve novel research problems. "CSC is delighted to join with Cray and AMD in offering these grants to deserving young people at Finnish universities and polytechnic institutes," said Juha Haataja, director for science support at CSC, the Finnish IT center for science. "This program offers them a great opportunity to take advantage of one of the most powerful systems in Europe to carry out work that has the potential to push the boundaries of computational science. With the Cray XT4 supercomputer's exceptional speed and scalability, grant recipients will be able to develop and test advanced algorithms, tools and techniques that could not be implemented on less powerful systems." The grant selection process will be closely monitored by CSC, which will announce grant winners at a special seminar later this year. Grants of between EUR 5,000 and EUR 25,000 will be awarded based on applications reviewed by the CSC's Resource Allocation Committee, with final selection made by the CSC management group. The organization will support the grant projects with resident computer science experts and other resources. "Cray is very happy about the launch of the University Grant Program at CSC who will soon have one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. The University Grant Program will help to strengthen computational science in Finland and it will grow the number of potential researchers across all scientific disciplines using high performance computing technology," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "The program is based on a close three-way partnership between Cray, AMD and CSC and is an excellent opportunity to give researchers early access to future developments within both AMD and Cray." "AMD and Cray are proud to contribute to empowering CSC to become a new landmark for the European research community. With a number of strategic successes in the US and EMEA AMD and Cray have a solid track record of providing highest performance low power computing solutions for researchers around the globe," said Francesco Torricelli, AMD world wide high performance computing manager. "The AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture is the ideal engine for the Cray XT4 architecture by providing sustained performance, scalability and longevity. With its pin- and power compatibility it furthermore enables a smooth upgrade path from current dual-core to future native AMD quad-core processors."