Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Orders Cray Supercomputer

By DE Editors

Cray has announced that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Manno, Switzerland has awarded a contract to Cray to acquire a next-generation Cray XMT supercomputer. The announcement marks Cray’s first order for the company’s next-generation Cray XMT system.

CSCS, which is currently home to a Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed “Rosa” and was also the recipient of the first-ever Cray XE6 system,  will use its next-generation Cray XMT supercomputer for solving problems that require large-scale data analysis. The massively multithreaded system will be part of a new project at CSCS called EUREKA, which will provide Swiss scientists with dedicated resources for large-scale data analysis services. The proposed facility will be used for large-scale analysis of unstructured data and data mining, and is designed for parallel applications that are dynamically changing, require random access to shared memory and typically do not run well on conventional systems.

“The next generation of the Cray XMT supercomputer is purpose-built for performing real-time analysis of web-scale data,” says Shoaib Mufti, director of knowledge management in Cray’s Custom Engineering group. “The system is ideal for analyzing dynamically changing data with complex relationships between time, space, events and communities, and excels at analytics tasks including pattern matching, scenario development, behavioral prediction, anomaly identification and graph analysis. The match between the needs of CSCS users and the strengths of the next-generation Cray XMT is an excellent fit, and we are very pleased that CSCS has signed the first contract for our new system.”

In 2011, Cray plans to launch the next-generation of the Cray XMT supercomputer, and CSCS is expected to receive its system later this year.

For more information, visit Cray.

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