Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology Upgrades Supercomputer

By DE Editors

Cray Inc. has announced that Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan)  has signed a contract to upgrade its recently acquired Cray XT6m system to a new Cray XE6 supercomputer. KTH’s PDC Center for High Performance Computing will use the more than 300-teraflops Cray XE6 supercomputer, equipped with the Cray Gemini network, to address complex scientific problems in a variety of disciplines including medicine, biology, fluid mechanics, astrophysics, climate modeling and life sciences.

Earlier this year, KTH’S PDC Center for High Performance Computing acquired a Cray XT6m supercomputer as part of a national plan by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) to provide Sweden’s scientists with access to world-class high-performance computing resources. The Cray XE6 system is expected to be delivered later this year.

“We are very pleased that after only a few months, PDC has made the decision to upgrade its Cray XT6m system to our new Cray XE6 supercomputer,” says Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. “Easy upgradeability is an important design element of Cray supercomputers, and this is a great example of a customer leveraging its HPC investment and expanding from a midrange system to a supercomputer featuring our company’s latest technologies. KTH is one of Europe’s most prestigious research institutions and we are very excited to add them to the growing list of Cray XE6 customers in Europe and around the world.”

“The Cray supercomputer is the most powerful academic system in Sweden right now,” says Dr. Erwin Laure, director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. “It has 93 teraflops peak performance at the moment, and when the system is fully upgraded later this year, the peak performance will reach more than 300 teraflops. That will make the PDC/KTH supercomputer one of Europe’s most powerful computers. SNIC and KTH’s investment in this system is providing a very good opportunity to keep pace with the rest of the world in terms of research that requires large computational resources.”

For more information, visit Cray.

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