Cray Supercomputer to Power Weather Research in Iceland

Supercomputer vendor Cray announced it has been awarded a $6 million contract to provide the Danish Meteorological Institute with a Cray XC supercomputer and Sonexion 2000 storage system. As a joint venture between DMI and the Icelandic Meteorological Office, the new system will be installed at the IMO data center in Reykjavik, Iceland.

The Cray XC line of supercomputers has done well in a variety of industries, crunching numbers for government, science, finance, and others, and being used at several leading Top500 sites.

Lately, Cray systems have helped power a number of new installations at worldwide weather and climate centers. Within the last year Cray announced that it has helped the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration boost its supercomputer capacity by a factor of ten and landed its largest contract outside of the US with a $128 million deal with the UK Meteorological office.

"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," Marianne Thyrring, director general of the Danish Meteorological Institute, said in a statement.

When in its final configuration, the supercomputer will be ten times more powerful than the current DMI system and will allow the two meteorological services to collaborate on producing high quality numerical weather modeling and predictions, according to Cray.

Speaking to DMI's involvement with the Danish Ministry of Climate, Thyrring added that they "feel obligated to use 100 percent green energy supply and cooling. Iceland supplies this through geothermal and hydropower."

System deliveries are expected in 2015 and 2017.