Cray XC50 Supercomputer coming to Institute for Basic Science in South Korea

Today Cray announced that the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has awarded the Company a contract valued at $9 million for a Cray XC50 supercomputer and Cray ClusterStor L300F storage system. The new supercomputer, paired with the scale-out Lustre storage solution, will provide high-performance capabilities for IBS to expand research in climate physics and work toward its goal of improving decadal earth system forecasts and long-term future climate projections.

By building a high-end supercomputing infrastructure with our addition of the Cray supercomputer and storage, we will be able to maximize performance of past-to-future and high-resolution global climate model simulations while significantly reducing research duration and costs,” said Axel Timmermann, director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP). “With Cray’s advanced system design and expertise in high-performance computing environments, our researchers are well-equipped to address some of the greatest challenges in oceanography, atmospheric science, glaciology and other areas.”

Located in Daejeon, South Korea, IBS was established by the South Korean government with the purpose of advancing the development of basic science in fields such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, life sciences, earth science and interdisciplinary science. The ICCP was established as the first earth science center within the IBS. ICCP expands the frontiers of earth system science by conducting cutting-edge research into climate dynamics, leveraging high-performance computer simulations.

IBS joins a growing list of research centers using Cray systems to advance earth science and provide the most powerful tools for their climate researchers,” said Nick Gorga, vice president of Asia Pacific sales at Cray. “With the convergence of supercomputing, analytics and AI, Cray’s platform is uniquely suited for data-intense problems faced by customers, like IBS, in their quest for scientific breakthroughs.”

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