SCIENCE

With an increasing focus on expanding its presence in the university segment of the high performance computing (HPC) market, global supercomputer leader Cray has announced at the 2010 Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans, LA that the City University of New York (CUNY), The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and the Yokohama City University in Japan have purchased new supercomputing systems from Cray. These three contract wins follow recent announcements of new Cray supercomputers at the University of Chicago and the University of Stuttgart.

Cray has a growing, worldwide list of universities that have purchased the Company's high-end supercomputers such as the Cray XT6 and Cray XE6 systems, as well as the midrange versions of both lines -- the Cray XT6m and the recently launched Cray XE6m. By offering customers the same scalable design and petascale architecture found in the largest Cray supercomputers in the world, but assembled in smaller configurations and offered at lower price points, the university segment is turning to Cray to provide HPC resources for its researchers, scientists and engineers.

"Universities are increasing their use of HPC to stay competitive in attracting research faculty and grants, and to support the growing number of collaborations with industry," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC. "With HPC products ranging from sub-$100,000 entry-level systems to extreme high-end machines, Cray is well positioned to serve universities of many sizes."

Cray's presence in the university segment extends beyond just selling supercomputers. The Company is focusing its efforts on working together with universities to move HPC forward. At the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Cray has assembled a team of researchers as part of its European Exascale Research Initiative, which is exploring new ideas and technologies for overcoming the challenges of delivering a supercomputing system capable of sustained exaflop (one quintillion mathematical calculations per second) application performance.

Another example of Cray's collaborative HPC efforts in the university segment is the Company's founding role in OpenSFS, a recently launched open-source file system alliance focused on improving current and future HPC Lustre deployments, which are widely used by universities. Cray is also leading the open-source development of a novel programming language, Chapel, that has involved the participation of several university partners including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Notre Dame, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University and others.

"Researchers and scientists studying at universities around the world are driven by a strong desire to continually push the boundaries of new research, and we are very pleased that Cray supercomputers are a sought-after and important resource for these efforts," said Barry Bolding, vice president of Cray's products division. "Cray designs and builds supercomputers with features that academic users demand, such as a scalable network, an adaptive software environment and production reliability. By combining these attributes in systems that cover a range of products and sizes, Cray supercomputers continue to find homes in university datacenters across the world."

The George Washington University recently acquired a Cray XE6m system that will be used by the Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and the High Performance Computing Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi. The supercomputer will play a vital role in advancing research in HPC, high-energy physics simulations including Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), and the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) parallel programming research, especially the supercomputing language Unified Parallel C, to name a few areas.

The new Cray XE6m system purchased by the Yokohama City University in Japan will be housed at the University's Division of Structural Bioinformatics and will aid two of Japan's most prominent academic researchers in their efforts to expand on the principle of three-dimensional structures and functions of bio-molecules, proteins and nucleic acids. CUNY purchased a Cray XE6m supercomputer to exploit advantages provided by PGAS programming languages, such as Unified Parallel C and Co-Array Fortran. CUNY's users are working on a project to jump-start academic research in the development of PGAS-based applications.

The University of Chicago recently purchased a Cray XE6 supercomputer, nicknamed "Beagle," to support computation, simulation and data analysis for the biomedical research community. Beagle will serve as a core research tool that will help ensure scientists remain at the forefront of modern life sciences research. Additionally, the University of Stuttgart's High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) signed a multi-year, multi-phase contract with Cray last month that includes the delivery of a Cray XE6 supercomputer and the future delivery of Cray's next-generation supercomputer code-named "Cascade." HLRS works directly with industrial partners in automotive and aerospace engineering, and the Cray systems at HLRS will serve as a supercomputing resource for researchers, scientists and engineers throughout Europe.