Hitachi’s main supercomputer system. Two new Cray supercomputers will be installed at a site in Kiyose, Tokyo within the coming months. (Credit: Courtesy of Hitachi)
Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) today announced that the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) is implementing two Cray® XC50™ supercomputers at its site in Kiyose, Tokyo. These systems are expected to deliver a combined peak performance of more than 18 petaflops. The supercomputers will support JMA in better understanding, modeling and predicting the atmosphere, oceans and typhoons, as well as in general weather forecasting.
The Cray XC50 supercomputers will be the central source of JMA’s ongoing efforts to be vigilant toward potential threats from natural disasters like typhoons, heavy rainfall, and other natural phenomena.
Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, Ltd. is Cray’s partner in the delivery of these XC50 supercomputers and Hitachi is the prime contractor and system integrator on the project. The Cray XC50 systems, which boast Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, will also have three Lustre® file systems each.
“Hitachi and Cray have delivered the supercomputer system which provides JMA the most optimal resource to carry out their critical task,” said Yoshinori Hosoya, President of Government & Public Corporation Information System Division, Hitachi, Ltd. “Hitachi will continue to cooperate with Cray and make the maximum effort possible to ensure that the agency remains as well prepared as possible in weather forecasting and its many other responsibilities.”
“Cray is excited to partner with Hitachi and to deliver these supercomputers to JMA so the weather authority can better predict and model the potentially devastating impacts of natural disasters in Japan,” said Mamoru Nakano, president of Cray Japan. “Japan will benefit by having these powerful Cray XC50 systems and, most importantly, our technology supports the mission of our customers, which, in this case, means saving lives.”
The Cray XC series of supercomputers is designed to handle the most challenging workloads requiring the highest levels of performance. Cray XC supercomputers incorporate the Aries™ high-performance 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; and the latest Intel processors. Cray XC systems deliver on Cray’s commitment to performance supercomputing with an architecture and tightly integrated software environment that provides extreme scalability and sustained performance.
The new systems at JMA are currently installed and expected to be put into production over the next few months.
