The Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC), Finland’s national high-performance computing facility, has awarded a $12 million contract to Cray for services and the company’s next-generation supercomputer code-named ‘Cascade’. With the vast majority of the system expected to be delivered in 2014, Cascade will be used by Finland’s researchers and scientists to solve scientific and engineering problems in a wide range of fields including climate change, energy research, materials science, gene interactions and medical research. The system will also be a Tier-1 resource under the European PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) initiative.
‘One of our primary goals is to provide the Finnish research community with extremely high-performance computing capability and pave their way towards new scientific innovations,’ said Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC. ‘We chose the Cascade system for its ability to enable breakthrough science in a production environment and we are convinced it will strengthen our position as a world-class research facility.’
Cray’s Cascade supercomputer is the next step in the company’s Adaptive Supercomputing vision. The system will feature major advancements to the Cray Linux Environment, Cray’s HPC-optimised programming environment and the next-generation Aries interconnect chipset. Cascade will also feature support for Intel Xeon processors.
