Cray announced details today surrounding their latest order from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan). Earlier this year, KTH purchased a new Cray XT6 supercomputer. This procurement will upgrade the brand new machine to an XE6 platform. The upgrade will bump performance to around 300TF and swap SeaStar networking gear for Cray’s new Gemini network.
We are very pleased that after only a few months, PDC has made the decision to upgrade its Cray XT6m system to our new Cray XE6 supercomputer,” said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. “Easy upgradeability is an important design element of Cray supercomputers, and this is a great example of a customer leveraging its HPC investment and expanding from a midrange system to a supercomputer featuring our company’s latest technologies. KTH is one of Europe’s most prestigious research institutions and we are very excited to add them to the growing list of Cray XE6 customers in Europe and around the world.”
The Cray supercomputer is the most powerful academic system in Sweden right now,” said Dr. Erwin Laure, director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. “It has 93 teraflops peak performance at the moment, and when the system is fully upgraded later this year, the peak performance will reach more than 300 teraflops. That will make the PDC/KTH supercomputer one of Europe’s most powerful computers. SNIC and KTH’s investment in this system is providing a very good opportunity to keep pace with the rest of the world in terms of research that requires large computational resources.”
KTH’S PDC Center for High Performance Computing acquired a Cray XT6m supercomputer as part of a national plan by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) to provide Sweden’s scientists with access to world-class high performance computing resources. For more info on the system digs in Sweden, read Cray’s full press release here.