SCIENCE

Cray has announced that Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan) has signed a contract to upgrade its recently acquired Cray XT6m system to a new Cray XE6 supercomputer. KTH's PDC Center for High Performance Computing will use the more than 300-teraflops Cray XE6 supercomputer, equipped with the Cray Gemini network, to address complex scientific problems in a variety of disciplines including medicine, biology, fluid mechanics, astrophysics, climate modeling and life sciences -- disciplines that require an increase in computing power and benefit substantially from features such as the integrated Cray network's low latency and global address-space.

Earlier this year, KTH'S PDC Center for High Performance Computing acquired a Cray XT6m supercomputer as part of a national plan by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) to provide Sweden's scientists with access to world-class high performance computing resources. The Cray XT6m system, which is in full production supporting the Center's scientific research, was officially inaugurated today during a ceremony at the PDC Center for High Performance Computing that marked its 20th anniversary. The Cray XE6 system is expected to be delivered later this year.

"We are very pleased that after only a few months, PDC has made the decision to upgrade its Cray XT6m system to our new Cray XE6 supercomputer," said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. "Easy upgradeability is an important design element of Cray supercomputers, and this is a great example of a customer leveraging its HPC investment and expanding from a midrange system to a supercomputer featuring our company's latest technologies. KTH is one of Europe's most prestigious research institutions and we are very excited to add them to the growing list of Cray XE6 customers in Europe and around the world."

"The Cray supercomputer is the most powerful academic system in Sweden right now," said Dr. Erwin Laure, director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. "It has 93 teraflops peak performance at the moment, and when the system is fully upgraded later this year, the peak performance will reach more than 300 teraflops. That will make the PDC/KTH supercomputer one of Europe's most powerful computers. SNIC and KTH's investment in this system is providing a very good opportunity to keep pace with the rest of the world in terms of research that requires large computational resources."

Launched in May 2010, the Cray XE6 supercomputer combines Cray's new Gemini system interconnect with powerful AMD Opteron processors and is designed to bring production petascale computing to a new and expanded base of high performance computing users. Fully upgradeable from the Cray XT5 and Cray XT6 line of supercomputers, the Cray XE6 system delivers improved network performance and features additional enhancements such as improved network resiliency, a mature and scalable software environment and the ability to run a broad array of ISV applications with the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment. This collection of industry-leading features provides Cray XE6 users with a supercomputing system that combines true scalable performance with production reliability.

About the PDC Center for High Performance Computing PDC, hosted by the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), operates leading-edge, high performance computers on a national level as part of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). PDC offers easily accessible computational resources that primarily cater to the needs of Swedish academic research and education. PDC also takes part in major international projects to develop high-performance computing for the future while remaining a leading national resource in parallel computing.