SCIENCE

Eurotech announces that it has received a $5.6 million USD order from Selex Elsag for supply of a HPC (High-Performance Computing) system of the Aurora family. Delivery is scheduled to take place in some steps during the next 9 months.

Selex Elsag, strategic unit of the Finmeccanica group in the defence and security electronics segment, will employ Eurotech's supercomputer in the emerging field of cyber security. For some years now use of HPCs outside the academic and scientific world has been growing and the ever-increasing digitalization of information also requires the security segment to process millions of data very fast, in just a few seconds. One of the most important requirements in the security segment – but also the most difficult to meet – is minimization of the impact of the time taken for checks on activities' actual execution times, particularly in the case of financial transactions, or if it is necessary not to give any evidence that a certain activity is subject to massive cross-checks. Whence the emergence of the tangible need for supercomputers, able to perform the large number of checks required in an extremely short time.

In addition, modern methods for the identification of cyber crimes increasingly involve techniques featuring cross-analysis of data coming from several different sources – and these techniques further increase the computing capacity required.

"We are very pleased that Selex Elsag has chosen our supercomputer for a fast-expanding application like cyber security," commented Roberto Siagri, Eurotech's Chairman and CEO. "Right from the start, Aurora architecture has been conceived to be used effectively not only for scientific research but also in the industrial and services domains – and this order confirms the rightness of our vision."