India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences Deploys Cray XC40 HPCs and Storage Systems

Cray Inc. announced that as part of a $67 million contract with Cray to update its supercomputing facilities and systems, the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India has deployed two Cray XC40 supercomputers and two Cray ClusterStor storage systems.

The combined systems are the largest supercomputing resource in India, and extend Cray’s leadership position in the weather forecasting and climate research communities.

The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) is dedicated to providing weather, climate, ocean, and seismological services to the citizens of India, and has upgraded its HPC capabilities to better support its operational and research activities. The two Cray systems are located at two divisions of MoES – the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India, and the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, India.

The Cray supercomputer at IITM will be used for conducting research on improving weather and climate forecasts, and the system – named ‘Pratyush’ which means the Sun – will also be used by other MoES organizations for research activities to improve their respective weather and climate services. The NCMRWF will use its Cray supercomputer to run daily, operational weather forecasts. The combined supercomputing systems have a peak performance of more than six petaflops, and more than 18PB of Cray ClusterStor storage capacity.

“Our new Cray supercomputing systems provide MoES’ scientists with the computational power needed for producing more accurate and reliable weather forecasts at much higher resolutions,” said Dr. Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. “Our country needs better forecasts for weather and climate events such as monsoons, tsunamis, cyclones, and extreme heat waves and cold snaps, and so it is imperative that we augment our HPC facilities with highly-advanced supercomputing systems. The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.“

Cray continues to strengthen its position in the weather forecasting and climate research space, as an increasing number of the centers rely on its supercomputers and storage systems to run their complex meteorological models. More than three-quarters of the world meteorological organization’s long range global modelling centers have selected Cray supercomputers for numerical weather prediction, and MoES is the latest organization to deploy Cray systems for numerical weather prediction and climate research.

“MoES has made a substantial enhancement to its high-performance computing infrastructure, and we are honored Cray was chosen to provide both the supercomputing and storage technologies necessary for improving their extensive range of important weather services for the people of India,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO, Cray. “The world’s preeminent global weather centers, like MoES, continue to rely on Cray supercomputers to power their weather forecasts. Our leadership position in earth sciences is representative of our proven ability to build production-ready supercomputing and storage systems across many data-intensive workloads such as weather forecasting, analytics, and artificial intelligence.“

The Cray XC series of HPCs are designed to handle the most challenging workloads requiring sustained multi-petaflop performance. The Cray XC40 supercomputers incorporate the Aries network interconnect for low latency and scalable global bandwidth, the HPC-optimized Cray Linux Environment, the Cray programing environment consisting of powerful tools for application developers, as well as the latest Intel processors and NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The Cray XC supercomputers deliver on company’s commitment to performance supercomputing with an architecture and tightly-integrated software environment that provides scalability and sustained performance.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at more than $67 million. The systems were accepted in late 2017.