$30 Million Contract for Cray

Cray Inc. announced the company has signed a contract with the University of Stuttgart to expand the Cray XC30 supercomputer, nicknamed ‘Hornet’ at the University’s HPC Center Stuttgart (HLRS).

When the expansion is complete, Hornet will have a peak performance of more than seven petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) of HPC power and 2.3PB of additional Cray file system storage for Lustre (CLFS).

The XC30 supercomputer at HLRS will serve as a supercomputing resource for researchers, scientists and engineers throughout Europe. HLRS is a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), which is an alliance of the three major supercomputing centers in Germany that collectively provide one of the largest and most powerful supercomputer infrastructures in the world. HLRS is also one of the leading centers in the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative.

“For a number of years now, we have worked in close collaboration with Cray to provide our researchers and scientists, as well as our industrial partners in the automotive and aerospace industries, with the computational resources of highly advanced supercomputing systems,” said Prof. Dr. Michael M. Resch, director, HLRS. “Reliability, performance, support and customer service are vitally important to us, and Cray and its supercomputers continue to meet the requirements of our organization and our vast user community. We are excited that the Cray XC30 supercomputer will power our research for the next several years.”

HLRS was the first customer worldwide to sign a contract for a XC30 supercomputer back in 2010, and is also the home of a XE6 supercomputer nicknamed ‘Hermit’.

“Over many years, HLRS and Cray have enjoyed a close cooperation, and we are honored that one of the world’s premier supercomputing centers has once again selected a Cray supercomputer to run their operations,” said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray VP Europe. “When the expansion to the HLRS system is complete, this Cray XC30 system will be one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. We are proud that HLRS again chose Cray, and we are very excited the system will be a valuable and highly utilized resource for the scientific community, as well as a large number of commercial companies across Europe.”

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at more than $30 million, and the system is expected to go into production in 2015.

Previously code-named ‘Cascade,’ the XC30 supercomputers are Cray’s most advanced HPC systems. The XC30 and XC30-AC HPC feature the Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; innovative cooling systems to lower customers’ TCO; the next-generation of the scalable, performance Cray Linux Environment supporting a range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a variety of processor types.

The Cray Lustre file system is an integrated solution from Cray that provides DDN block storage, Cray integrated servers and switches, and Cray supported Lustre distributions.