Swiss National Supercomputing Center installs new XT5

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Got an email today (hi, Dominik) letting me know that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS has installed its newest baby, a 141 TFLOPS Cray XT5. Picture included (she’s a beauty). From their website:

Image of the new XT5 at CSCSThe name of the supercomputer, “Monte Rosa”, refers to the famous Swiss-Italian mountainous massif , and it is quite fitting that it carries connotations of conquering the peaks when you realise that barely three months elapsed between ETH Zurich giving the go-ahead to upgrade its predecessor “Piz Palu”, and the new supercomputer being switched on. CSCS expects to declare the computer open for general access to its user community some time this week.

The new machine increases their computational capabilities by a factor of 8.

Almost a week on, 14,752 processors at CSCS are now capable of performing 141 trillion computer operations per second. This means that in one fell swoop CSCS has been able to increase its capacity enormously, and the scientific research community is now able to make use of this new machine which is currently more powerful than all of the computer clusters in Switzerland put together. As a consequence, researchers have now been called upon to submit so-called high-impact projects involving challenging simulations that they have had in the pipeline, but which had simply not been feasible in Switzerland until now due to a lack of sufficient large scale computer facilities.