Seattle, WA and Reading, UK – July 25, 2013 – Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY) today announced the Company has been awarded 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 high performance computing (HPC) facility in the UK, and is the follow-on to the High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) project. The new Cray XC30 supercomputer will provide nearly four times the scientific throughput of its predecessor, HECToR, which is a Cray 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 wide 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 vice president, 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 Cray XC30 supercomputer is Cray’s most advanced HPC system and is engineered to meet the performance challenges of HPC users. The Cray XC30 supercomputer features the Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; an innovative cooling system that utilizes a transverse airflow to lower customers’ total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment that also supports a wide range of ISV applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types, including Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, and NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators.
The Cray scalable storage solution to be deployed at the University of Edinburgh includes the Cray Sonexion scale-out Lustre system. The solution includes nearly five petabytes of capacity and 100 gigabytes per-second of applications performance. Cray Sonexion vastly reduces deployment time and simplifies Lustre for petascale solutions. Cray Sonexion provides performance scalability from five gigabytes per-second to one terabyte per-second in a single file system – and performs optimally at scale. Management is simplified through component reduction, by over 50 percent 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.
Additional information on the Cray XC30 supercomputer and Cray Sonexion storage system can be found on the Cray website.
About EPSRC
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC invests around £800 million a year in research and postgraduate training, to help the nation handle the next generation of technological change. The areas covered range from information technology to structural engineering, and mathematics to materials science. This research forms the basis for future economic development in the UK and improvements for everyone’s health, lifestyle and culture. EPSRC works alongside other Research Councils with responsibility for other areas of research. The Research Councils work collectively on issues of common concern via Research Councils UK.
About NERC
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is the UK’s main agency for funding and managing world-class research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. It coordinates some of the world’s most exciting research projects, tackling major issues such as climate change, food security, environmental influences on human health, the genetic make-up of life on earth, and much more. NERC receives around £300m a year from the government’s science budget, which it uses to fund research and training in universities and its own research centres.
About Cray Inc.
Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY) provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world’s most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and Big Data solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray’s Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today’s limitations and meeting the market’s continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.
