Press release: Cray Supercomputer at PDC
Stockholm – 22 June 2010: PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Southpole AB and CRAY Inc. signed a contract for an upgrade of a recently installed CRAY XT6m supercomputer at PDC to a new CRAY XE6 system to achieve 305 teraFLOPS peak performance. The system is financed by Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) and KTH, and based on the new AMD Opteron 12-core “Magny-Cours” processors and the Cray Gemini interconnect technology.
The Cray XE6 system will be used by hundreds of scientists and researchers and will be part of the European network of supercomputers. It will strengthen the already well established position of KTH and PDC center as a strong partner in major international projects such as Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), European Grid Initiative (EGI) and others. The Swedish research and development will profit immensely from the enormous increase of compute power, data storage capacity and fast I/O performance of the new CRAY XE6 system as well. The Cray supercomputer at PDC will serve for the scientist as an irreplaceable tool to address higher challenges and reach excellent results in such crucial areas as medicine, biology, fluid mechanics, astrophysics, climate modeling, life sciences etc. It will be part of the SNIC infrastructure as well as part of the multiple large national projects such as the Swedish e-science Research Centre (SeRC).
“The Cray supercomputer is the most powerful academic system in Sweden right now," said Erwin Laure, director of PDC-HPC at KTH. It has 93 teraFLOPS peak performance at the moment, and when the supercomputer is fully upgraded in autumn, the peak performance will reach more than 305 teraFLOPS. That will make the KTH supercomputer one of Europe's most powerful computers. 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, for instance in areas such as e-science.
The currently installed CRAY XT6m system has 93 teraFLOPS peak performance and consists of 11,016 processor cores. On the TOP500 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, published in June 2010, KTH stands in the 76th place with the current first phase CRAY XT6m system. The official opening of the supercomputer will take place on 31th of August, during PDC 20 year anniversary celebration.
About the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. PDC operates leading-edge, high-performance computers on a national level. 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 and stay a leading national resource in parallel computing. For more information visit .
About KTH. KTH accounts for one-third of Sweden’s technical research and engineering education capacity at university level. Education and research cover a broad spectrum – from natural sciences to all the branches of engineering as well as architecture, industrial engineering and management, urban planning, work science and environmental engineering. In addition to the research carried out by KTH’s Schools, a large number of both national and local Competence Centres are located at KTH. Various research foundations also finance a number of research programmes. For more information please visit KTH homepage .
About SNIC. Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) is a metacentre dedicated to Swedish researchers and their requirements. SNIC's mandate is to provide unified access to the leading supercomputers in Sweden. SNIC is responsible for the strategic and scientific development and funding of high performance computing resources in Sweden.For more information please visit SNIC homepage .
About Cray Inc. As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray Inc. provides innovative computing platforms that enable scientists and engineers in academia, government, and industry to meet both existing and future computational challenges on a wide variety of applications. Cray supercomputers provide superior sustained performance on critical applications, scalability to handle larger problems and the reliability to run jobs to completion. This gives scientists and engineers the ability not only to get answers faster but also allows a broad spectrum of users to ask new questions. For more information please visit Cray website .
About Southpole AB. Provider of Linux based solutions. Experts in HPC and Linux clusters. Provides high-performing server solutions and custom built servers. Subsidiary "South Pole Consulting AB" that is 100% focused on embedded Linux consulting. Long experience with Linux on many different platforms, including; x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS and SH. For more information please visit Southpole website .