Deutscher Wetterdienst Awards $23 Million Contract to Cray

Cray,
Inc. announced it has been awarded a $23 million contract to provide two Cray XC30 supercomputers and two Cray
Sonexion 1600 storage systems to Germany’s
National Meteorological Service – the Deutscher
Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany,
DWD is a premier numerical weather prediction centers.

Researchers and scientists at DWD will be able to apply the petascale
computing resources of the two XC30 supercomputers – one of which will be
used for production and the other for research and backup – towards its mission
of meeting the meteorological requirements arising from all areas of economy
and society in Germany.
The new Cray supercomputers will enable DWD to produce higher resolution and
more accurate global and regional weather forecasts to help fulfill the
organization’s wide array of weather responsibilities, such as the
meteorological safeguarding of aviation and shipping, and the issuance of
official warnings of weather occurrences that could become a danger for public
safety.

"At our national meteorological service, we are responsible for providing
services for the protection of life and property in the form of weather and
climate information," said Prof. Dr. Gerhard Adrian, president
of DWD. "This is the core task of
the DWD, and thus it is imperative that we equip our researchers and scientists
with scalable, productive, and above all, highly reliable supercomputing
systems. The Cray XC30 supercomputers will be valuable resources for us, and we
are pleased to be working with Cray."

"DWD is one of the world’s most prestigious numerical weather prediction
centers, and we’re honored to provide them with the supercomputing technologies
necessary for delivering such an extensive range of important services,"
said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray VP, Europe.
"We are looking forward to building
a strong collaboration and close partnership with DWD. This contract is yet
another example of how we continue to expand our presence in the meteorological
community in Europe and
across the globe."

Previously
code-named Cascade, the XC30 supercomputer is Cray’s
most advanced HPC system and is engineered to meet the performance challenges
of HPC users. It features the new Aries system
interconnect; a new Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from
locality constraints; a cooling system that utilizes a transverse
airflow to lower customers’ TCO; the next-generation of the scalable, high
performance Cray Linux Environment that also supports a wide range of ISV
applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to
handle a variety of processor types including the Intel Xeon processors –
a first for Cray’s high-end systems.

The two Cray
Sonexion 1600 storage systems that will be deployed at DWD will have a combined
capacity of more than 3PB of storage and 72GB/s of combined bandwidth. Sonexion Lustre System for HPC provides an embedded, compact design that can
reduce the overall storage footprint by up to 50%t over component-based
solutions. It ensures consistency and predictability when scaling Lustre,
and offers performance, scalability, and an open solution for
HPC and big data in a compact form factor.

Consisting
of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at
more than $23 million, and the systems are expected to be delivered and put into
production in 2013 and 2014.