Cray Awarded $32 Million Contract at Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

Cray Inc.
has signed a contract with the Swiss National Supercomputing
Centre (CSCS) to upgrade and expand its Cray XC30 supercomputer.

When the upgrade and expansion is completed, the Centre’s Cray XC system,
nicknamed ‘Piz Daint’ after a mountain in the Swiss Alps, will be the
first petascale supercomputer in Switzerland.

In September
2012, Cray announced it was awarded a contract to provide
CSCS with a 750-teraflop XC30 supercomputer and a Cray Sonexion storage
system. Under the terms of this new contract, Cray will upgrade Piz Daint to
include NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators. CSCS is the first customer to
order a Cray XC supercomputer with NVIDIA GPUs.

Located in
Lugano, Switzerland, CSCS is one an HPC facility and is focused
on ensuring the Swiss scientific and industrial communities have the
supercomputing resources to stay competitive on an international
level. As a result of the upgrade to Piz Daint, the Centre’s researchers and
scientists will be able to leverage the processor and
accelerator technologies featured in the XC supercomputer towards
advancing key research in areas such as material science, molecular biology,
climate and atmospheric modeling, and geoscience.

"Piz Daint will help advance the research
projects of our diverse user community by leaps and bounds," said
Thomas Schulthess, director of CSCS. "With
GPU acceleration integrated into Cray’s latest generation supercomputer, the
application performance and the energy efficiency of our simulations will
improve significantly. We are very excited about the collaborative development
of a truly general-purpose, hybrid multi-core system with Cray."

"The upgrade to Piz Daint into a petascale
supercomputing system is yet another example of the strong leadership of CSCS
to consistently provide researchers and scientists within the Swiss HPC
community with the latest supercomputing technologies," said Dr. Ulla
Thiel, Cray VP, Europe. "We are
honored to continue our collaborative partnership with CSCS, and we are very
excited to provide CSCS users with the computational tools they need to achieve
breakthrough scientific results."

Previously
code-named ‘Cascade’, the XC30 supercomputer is Cray’s most
advanced HPC system. It features the new Aries system interconnect;
a 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 Cray Linux Environment that also supports a range of ISV applications;
Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a
variety of processor types, including Xeon processors, Xeon Phi
coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.

The Cray Sonexion storage
system at CSCS has more than 2PB of usable storage and more than 100GB/s
of sustained aggregate IO performance. Sonexion Lustre System for HPC
provides an embedded, compact design that can reduce the overall storage
footprint by up to 50% over component-based solutions. Sonexion 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.

This contract is valued at more than $32 million,
and the upgraded system is expected to be operational in 2014.