Cray Awarded $30 Million Contract With University of Edinburgh

Cray Inc.
announced a $30 million contract from the Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to deliver a Cray XC30 supercomputer and
a Cray Sonexion storage system to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland as
part of the ARCHER project.

ARCHER is the next generation of a national HPC facility in the UK, and is the
follow-on to the High-End Computing
Terascale Resource (HECToR) project.

The XC30 supercomputer will
provide nearly four times the scientific throughput of its predecessor, HECToR,
which is a XE6 supercomputer. It will also be an essential system for
scientists in the UK, in particular those funded by EPSRC and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

"One of our primary goals is to
increase the ability of UK researchers to make valuable contributions to the
solution of important, grand-challenge problems, and the Cray XC30
supercomputer will be a powerful tool in support of these efforts,"
said professor David Delpy, chief executive, EPSRC. "The ARCHER project advances HECToR’s initiatives to assemble the
computational resources necessary for breakthrough research in a broad range of
disciplines, and we are pleased that Cray will continue to be a strategic
partner for UK research."

The ARCHER project is focused on an overall vision to build on the existing
investments in national HPC facilities so that the UK is a recognized leader on
the international scene for computational science and engineering. The project
provisions high-end computing resources for use in a range of scientific
and academic research in fields such as climate, oceanography, life sciences,
aerospace, and many others.

"The HECToR and ARCHER programs are
the premier supercomputing facilities in the UK and widely respected across
Europe, and we are honored that EPSRC will once again provide researchers and
scientists with a world-class supercomputer from Cray that is highly scalable,
energy efficient and reliable," said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray VP, Europe.
"We are very pleased to continue our
collaboration and joint research initiatives with our partner institutions in
the UK."

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. The supercomputer features
the 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, high performance 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 scalable storage solution to be deployed at the University of
Edinburgh includes the Sonexion scale-out Lustre system. The solution
includes nearly 5PB of capacity and 100GB/s of applications performance. Sonexion reduces deployment time and simplifies Lustre for
petascale solutions. It provides performance scalability from 5GB/s
to 1TB/s in a single file system – and performs optimally at scale.
Management is simplified through component reduction, by over 50% for
petascale systems.

Consisting of products and multi-year services, the contract is valued at
approximately $30 million in total revenue and the system is expected to be
delivered and put into production in 2013.