Press release: KTH hosts the largest ever R&D computer investment in Sweden
A great new resource, which will provide cutting-edge capabilities for areas like climate modelling, fluid dynamics, plasma physics, materials science and molecular simulation, will soon be available for computational science research in Sweden. KTH has just been awarded 170 million SEK for a next-generation supercomputer to replace Lindgren, the current flagship system at the PDC Center for High-Performance Computing. The funding is being provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), which provides large-scale computing resources for academic research in Sweden, along with co-funding from KTH and contributions from industry. The budget will cover the cost of owning the system over the next four years, making it the largest ever investment in supercomputing resources in Swedish academia. Four years might seem like a short time for so much money, but Erwin Laure, PDC’s Director, explains that, due to rapid developments in computing power and speed, supercomputers need to be updated or replaced very frequently so that Swedish researchers can remain competitive on a world-scale.
PDC is starting the procurement process for the new supercomputer now and aims to have the system in place and running by spring 2015. The new system will be one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the Nordic countries; it will be over four times faster than Lindgren, which means that we will reach a level of petaflop performance (1015 floating point operations per second) for the first time in Swedish academia. This improvement will provide a major increase in the computational capabilities available to Swedish researchers and their industrial collaborators and facilitate new scientific breakthroughs in all areas of e-Science research.