Cray today announced that CSC Finland, the Finnish IT center for science, will acquire a Cray massively parallel processing (MPP) system delivering over 70 teraflops (70 trillion floating point operations per second) of compute power to CSC's high performance computing users. The new Cray supercomputer, code-named Hood, will be installed in stages beginning later this year and continuing through 2008. It will replace a four-year-old cluster system that can no longer keep pace with the performance needs of the Finnish research community, which is currently doubling its computer usage every 16 months. "We selected the Cray Hood supercomputer after an extensive acquisition process that involved surveying 35 different research groups, closely analyzing the available technologies and benchmarking competing systems," said Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC Finland. "Our goal was to procure the most powerful system for the funds that we had available. The new Cray supercomputer will provide the capability required by our diverse research groups and bring Finland back to the leading edge in Europe." CSC provides IT infrastructure, skills and specialist services for universities, polytechnic colleges, research institutions and companies across Finland, and collaborates with various research institutions worldwide. The new Hood system will be used for research in areas such as physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, linguistics, bioscience, applied mathematics and engineering. The acquisition project was started in 2005 based on the budget proposal of Finland's Ministry of Education and the Council of State. "We are delighted to welcome CSC Finland as a Cray customer," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "As one of the most prominent supercomputing centers in Europe with a broad range of high performance computing disciplines, CSC is in an excellent position to maximize the advantages of our new Hood MPP system in solving the most demanding scientific problems and exceeding the requirements of a production supercomputer environment."