Cray has been awarded a contract to provide the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) with a next-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade" and a next-generation Cray Sonexion storage system. The Cascade system will be located at CSCS's new high-performance computing facility, which was inaugurated last month in Lugano, Switzerland.
"We are very proud of the long and close partnership we have developed with CSCS," said Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. "We are thrilled to be installing a large, next-generation Cray supercomputer at CSCS later this year. This system will be an excellent base for an ambitious joint research and co-development program, and will enable the scientific users of CSCS to be at the forefront of technology."
Cray's Cascade supercomputer, which is expected to be widely available in 2013, will feature major advancements to the Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, and a next-generation interconnect chipset called Aries. The Cascade supercomputer is in part made possible by Cray's participation in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program.
The Cascade system that will be delivered to CSCS will go into production in 2013 and is expected to deliver a peak performance of 750 TFlops/s. Cascade's new architectural features, in particular the interconnect technology and processor options, will help Swiss scientists to advance key research in areas such as material science, climate modeling, geosciences, molecular biology and biomedical engineering.
"The new Cascade system will give our science community the opportunity to bear the fruits of application developments within the Swiss HP2C platform," said CSCS director Thomas Schulthess. "In particular, developers' investments into hybrid and future computing architectures will be rewarded by Cray's next-generation supercomputer."
For more information, visit Cray.
Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.
| 
