Global supercomputer leader Cray announced the Company has been awarded a $39 million contract from the North-German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) to deliver a distributed Cray XC30 supercomputing system, which will be operated at two sites -- the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and the High Performance Computing Center (RRZN) at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.

HLRN is an alliance amongst seven states in Northern Germany -- Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, and Schleswig-Holstein -- that have combined resources and secured funding from the state governments and the German federal government to acquire the new Cray XC30 systems.

The HLRN sites in Berlin and Hannover plan to operate the Cray XC30 supercomputers as one combined system, providing universities and research centers in the northern states of Germany with a powerful petascale computing resource. Named "HLRN-III," the Cray XC30 supercomputing system will support advanced scientific research in a wide range of fields, including environmental research, climate and ocean modeling, physics, chemistry, bio-informatics, engineering, and fluid dynamics.

"Researchers in Northern Germany will soon benefit from a significant increase in computing power as a result of procuring the new HLRN-III system from Cray," said Prof. Dr. Thomas Rung, head of the Scientific Board of the HLRN. "The Cray XC30 offers a flexible computing architecture that will fulfill our need for advanced supercomputing technologies now and into the future. This is an exciting moment for the scientific community across the northern states of Germany."

"We are very excited that HLRN has turned to Cray to provide their researchers and scientists with an innovative supercomputing system that is designed to deliver breakthrough science with superior performance and scalability," said Dr. Ulla Thiel, Cray vice president, Europe. "With these large installations in Berlin and Hannover, Cray continues to strengthen its presence internationally and expand its coverage across the European HPC landscape."

Previously code-named "Cascade," the Cray XC30 supercomputer is Cray's most advanced high performance computing (HPC) system and is engineered to meet the performance challenges of HPC users. The Cray XC30 supercomputer features the new HPC-optimized Aries system interconnect; a new Dragonfly topology that frees applications from locality constraints; an innovative cooling system that utilizes a transverse airflow to lower customers' total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment that also supports a wide range of ISV applications; Cray's HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types including the Intel® Xeon® processors -- a first for Cray's high-end systems.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $39 million, and a vast majority of the system is expected to be delivered and put into production in 2013. As part of this contract, the HLRN-III system will also include a Cray storage solution, which will incorporate products from DDN and Hitachi Data Systems.