Cray Wins $20 million Supercomputer Contract

By DE Editors

Cray Inc. has signed a contract with the Foundation for Space Technology, Applications and Science (FUNCATE), which is responsible for the procurement of high performance computers in Brazil. The purpose of the contract is to provide the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) with a new Cray XT6 supercomputer for weather forecasts and climate studies. INPE is the company’s first Cray XT customer in Brazil and, upon installation of the new Cray XT6 system, the country will be home to one of the largest numerical weather prediction and climate research centers in the world, according to Cray.

Consisting of products and multi-year services, the contract is valued at more than $20 million and the system is expected to go into production in late 2010.

Announced in November 2009, the Cray XT6 supercomputer is designed to be a general-purpose supercomputer. The compute blade in the Cray XT6 system features four compute nodes designed for high scalability in a small footprint and can be configured with up to 96 processor cores per blade or more than 2,300 processor cores per cabinet. Each compute node is composed of two AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors (the eight and 12-core “Maranello”  platform), each coupled with its own memory and dedicated Cray Seastar2+  interconnect.

For more information, visit Cray.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.