Cray launches Euro exascale research initiative

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Cray announced today from the Cray Executive Forum Europe in Frankfurt that they are launching a new exascale research effort

Cray logoAs the first company to design and build a supercomputer that achieved sustained application performance of more than one petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second), Cray is committed to the research and development of new technologies necessary to achieve exaflops computing. The challenges are significant and will require research and development into power and cooling infrastructure, system and application resiliency, lightweight communication, efficient processor and network architectures, and new programming models.

“We are very excited to be partnering closely with the European HPC community in kicking off this important initiative for the company,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “Reaching and surpassing the petaflops barrier was an extraordinary achievement and these systems are providing unsurpassed supercomputing resources for meeting significant scientific challenges. We know there are scientific breakthroughs in important areas such as new energy sources and global climate change that are waiting for exascale performance, and we are working hard on building next-generation supercomputers that will be capable of it.”

The effort is focused on Europe, with partners at big HPC customers EPCC (at The University of Edinburgh) and at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).

On Dec. 3, The University of Edinburgh will announce the creation of its Exascale Technology Centre at EPCC. Peter Ungaro will speak at the official launch of this centre, which will be a joint investment of Cray and the University of Edinburgh and which forms part of Cray’s Exascale Research Initiative in Europe. The other initial partner within this Cray research initiative is CSCS. Cray will collaborate with CSCS in the framework of the HP2C project, which targets the development of future applications for very large scale simulations (see www.hp2c.org). Cray plans to launch new strategic alliances in the future to continually grow and expand this important research initiative.

Its interesting to me that this effort is focused in Europe, where I’ve remarked before on the high degree of pan-European planning and effort taking place in apex scientific computing.