BIG DATA

This is the latest in a series of upgrades for the Cray system at CSCS since the Lugano, Switzerland-based research facility installed Europe's first Cray XT3 supercomputer in 2005. CSCS is leveraging the petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second) computing architecture of the Cray XT5 supercomputer to provide the Swiss scientific and industrial community with computing resources necessary to stay competitive on an international level.

The Cray XT5 system features more than 14,000 AMD Opteron cores for performance in excess of 140 teraflops and is accessed by CSCS users working in fields as diverse as chemistry, physics, material sciences, climatology, geology, biology, genetics, experimental medicine, astronomy, mathematics and computer sciences. The Cray XT5 supercomputer at CSCS also features Cray's innovative ECOphlex cooling technology designed to remove the heat generated by the system's processors without using air handlers, thus saving a significant amount of energy.

The current upgrade is part of a series of immediate steps taken in Switzerland toward sustained petaflops scale computing in science and engineering, and part of an initiative in HPC and Networking (HPCN) that the Federal Council of Switzerland intends to implement. The network of this initiative consists of substantial new investments in application development teams for high-performance and high-productivity computing (HP2C) at Swiss universities that will be supported by CSCS and the new Institute for Computational Science at the University of Lugano.

"We are very excited about the opportunities to push simulation-based sciences to their limits with the concomitant development of the center's hardware and the HP2C platform, and we are grateful to the Swiss University Conference, the ETH Domain, and the Swiss economy package 2009 for providing the financial resources to jumpstart the HPCN initiative in a timely manner," says Thomas Schulthess, director of CSCS and Professor for Computational Physics at ETH Zurich. Thomas recently moved to ETH from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was involved in leadership computing projects -- a team he lead won the 2009 Gordon Bell Prize for running the first real scientific application that sustained more than a petaflops on a general purpose supercomputer, a Cray XT5 system nicknamed "Jaguar."

"We are very excited to continue and expand our successful relationship with CSCS, and to be a part of so many breakthrough results in scientific research utilizing the computational power of Cray supercomputers," said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. "CSCS is once again taking the lead in moving to the forefront of technology and further advancing Switzerland's prominent position in the worldwide scientific research community. We are honored that Cray can play such an important role in this effort."