UK Launches HPC Service Using Cray Supercomputing Technology

By DE Editors

Established to provide next-generation high performance computing (HPC) service for the UK’s academic community, Cray Inc. (Seattle, WA) and the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland) unveiled the new Cray XT4 supercomputer.

To be housed in the University’s Advanced Computing Facility, the supercomputer will assist UK researchers and enable scientific advancements in materials simulation, computational chemistry, disaster simulation and emergency response, biomolecular science, and engineering modeling.

Cray was selected for the multistage project that will provide researchers at universities across the UK with access to industry-leading HPC resources. The unveiling officially launched the first phase of the UK’s High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) project, initiated and funded by the UK’s Research Councils led by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The Cray XT4 system is a massively parallel processor (MPP) system that provides sustained performance by balancing performance between processors, memory, interconnect, and I/O; hardware and software are designed to scale to more than 120,000 processor cores and over one petaflops of peak performance.

The delivery of the Cray X2 system in 2008 will make HECToR the first recipient of a Cray XT5h system, which, according to the release, is the industry’s first integrated hybrid supercomputer. The latter phases will include the integration of the new Cray X2 system in 2008 and a next-generation Cray MPP supercomputer in 2009.

For more information, go to Cray Inc.

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