Today Cray announced that the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India has deployed a pair of Cray XC40 supercomputers with Cray ClusterStor storage systems. The combined systems are the largest supercomputing resource in India, and extend Cray’s leadership position in the weather forecasting and climate research communities.
Our new Cray supercomputing systems provide MoES’ scientists with the computational power needed for producing more accurate and reliable weather forecasts at much higher resolutions,” said Dr. Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. “Our country needs better forecasts for weather and climate events such as monsoons, tsunamis, cyclones, and extreme heat waves and cold snaps, and so it is imperative that we augment our HPC facilities with highly-advanced supercomputing systems. The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.”
The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) is dedicated to providing world-class weather, climate, ocean, and seismological services to the citizens of India, and has significantly upgraded its high-performance computing capabilities to better support its operational and research activities. The two Cray systems are located at two divisions of MoES – the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India, and the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, India.
The Cray supercomputer at IITM will be used for conducting research on improving weather and climate forecasts, and the system – named “Pratyush” which means the Sun – will also be used by other MoES organizations for research activities to improve their respective weather and climate services. The NCMRWF will use its Cray supercomputer to run daily, operational weather forecasts. The combined supercomputing systems have a peak performance of more than six petaflops, and more than 18 petabytes of Cray ClusterStor storage capacity.
Cray continues to strengthen its leadership position in the weather forecasting and climate research space, as an increasing number of the world’s leading centers rely on Cray supercomputers and storage systems to run their complex meteorological models. More than three-quarters of the World Meteorological Organization’s Long Range Global Modelling Centers have selected Cray supercomputers for numerical weather prediction, and MoES is the latest organization to deploy Cray systems for numerical weather prediction and climate research.
MoES has made a substantial enhancement to its high-performance computing infrastructure, and we are honored Cray was chosen to provide both the supercomputing and storage technologies necessary for improving their extensive range of important weather services for the people of India,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “The world’s preeminent global weather centers, like MoES, continue to rely on Cray supercomputers to power their weather forecasts. Our leadership position in earth sciences is representative of our proven ability to build production-ready supercomputing and storage systems across many data-intensive workloads such as weather forecasting, analytics, and artificial intelligence.”
Consisting of products and services, Cray’s multi-year contract is valued at more than $67 million. The systems were accepted in late 2017.
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