Cray Signs $6 Million Contract With Danish Meteorological Institute

Cray Inc. announced the company has been awarded a $6 million contract to provide the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) with a XC supercomputer and a Sonexion 2000 storage system.

DMI and a growing list of meteorological centers continue to run their complex, data-intensive climate and weather models on Cray supercomputers.

Through an arrangement with the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO), DMI has chosen to install the Cray supercomputer and Sonexion storage system at the IMO datacenter in Reykjavik, Iceland for year-round power and cooling efficiency. This marks the first-ever Cray system in Iceland, and the first remote installation of a production weather system through a joint venture between two national meteorological centers.

Established in 1872 and located in Copenhagen, DMI is a meteorological institute focused on helping citizens, public authorities, and private companies transform knowledge about weather, climates, and seas into safety and growth. DMI provides meteorological services in the Commonwealth of the Realm of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the surrounding waters and airspace. The Institute’s services include forecasting, warnings, and monitoring of weather, climate, and related environmental conditions in the atmosphere, on land, and at sea, with the purpose of safeguarding human life and activity.

“It was paramount to us to find a business partner with the organization and skills to install a supercomputing solution in Iceland that could operate remotely 1,300 miles away from Denmark, and Cray filled all the criteria,” said Mrs. Marianne Thyrring, director general, Danish Meteorological Institute. “This is a first-time-ever in the world attempt for two meteorological services to run an operational and meteorological environment from that distance. International partnerships between meteorological services on HPC and weather modelling like the one between DMI and IMO is still in its infancy, but shows great promise. I am sure it is the future. And since we are part of the Danish Ministry of Climate and do climate modelling, we feel obligated to use 100 % green energy supply and cooling. Iceland supplies this through geothermal and hydro-power.“

In its final configuration, the new Cray XC supercomputer will be ten times more powerful than DMI’s current system, and will provide the Institute with the supercomputing resources needed to produce high quality numerical weather predictions within specified time intervals and with a high level of reliability.

“The Danish Meteorological Institute’s selection of a Cray system to improve their weather forecasting capabilities is reflective of Cray’s leadership position in the weather and climate community,” said Catalin Morosanu, Cray’s VP sales, EMEA. “The world’s premier meteorological centers continue to rely on Cray supercomputers to power their weather forecasts, and we are proud that leading institutions such as DMI and IMO continue to put their trust in Cray.“

The XC series of supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of most demanding HPC users. Special features of the XC supercomputers include: the industry Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; optional DataWarp applications I/O flash SSD accelerator technology; cooling systems to lower customers’ TCO; the next-generation of the scalable and integrated Cray Linux environment that supports a range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a variety of processor types, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.

The Sonexion 2000 storage system combines Cray’s Lustre expertise with an integrated design that allows for maximum scalability and performance. Management and operations are simplified through an appliance design with all storage components including software, storage and infrastructure.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $6 million, with system deliveries expected in 2015 and 2017.