Cray to Install a $30 Million, 5 Petaflop (peak) XC30 Supercomputer at University of Edinburgh

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.”

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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.