Cray and SGI win HPC Deals update from July 2012

Here’s our review of some of today’s noteworthy links for the high performance computing industry:

Cray awarded $12 million for Finnish supercomputer

Cray announced it has been awarded a supercomputer contract to provide the Finnish IT Center for Science Ltd. (CSC) with a next-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade."  In its first ever HPC facility Finland's Cascade supercomputer will enable CSC to provide cost-effective supercomputing capacity for the needs of science and research across Finland. Researchers and scientists will use it to solve scientific and engineering problems in a wide range of fields including climate change, energy research, materials science, gene interactions and medical research.

"One of our primary goals is to provide the Finnish research community with extremely high performance computing capability and pave their way towards new scientific innovations," said Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC. "We chose the Cascade system for its ability to enable breakthrough science in a production environment, and we are convinced it will strengthen our position as a world-class research facility."

Cray's Cascade supercomputer, which is expected to be widely available in the first half of 2013, is the next step in Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The system will feature major advancements to the Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, and the next-generation Aries interconnect chipset. Cascade will also feature support for Intel Xeon processors.

SGI selected by UK's N8 Research Partnership

SGI announced that the N8 Research Partnership (N8), a consortium of eight universities in the North of England, has deployed a new SGI supercomputer cluster comprised of 83 SGI Rackable standard depth servers with Intel Xeon processors E5-2600 product family (total of 5312 cores). Located at the University of Leeds it will be used by researchers from all eight partner universities and selected commercial organisations for a variety of compute intensive tasks in computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, physics and biosciences. To fulfil its ambition N8 needed an HPC system that delivers the highest levels of performance and a partner that could offer expert collaboration that would deliver further value to researchers.

"Through this investment we are aiming to engage a new generation of researchers and industrial partners and equip them with the HPC skills and hardware that they need to commission and deliver world class science," said Chris Taylor, principle investigator for the N8 HPC project Professor. "The close working relationship with Esteem and SGI, together with their early involvement has laid a solid foundation for these goals, making it possible to achieve delivery against the extremely tight funding application and deployment schedules."

SGI partner Esteem Systems worked with N8's bid leaders, The University of Manchester and the University of Leeds, to secure £3.25m  (~$5 million USD) worth of research funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the project.