In a sign of the growing interest in high-performance computing by companies and organisations outside of science and engineering, Eurotech, a supplier of embedded and supercomputing technologies, has received a EUR 4 million order from Selex Elsag for a system from its Aurora family. Delivery is scheduled to take place in phases over the next 9 months.
Selex Elsag, the strategic unit of the Finmeccanica group in the defence and security electronics sector, will employ Eurotech's supercomputer in the emerging field of cyber security. For some years now the use of HPC outside the academic and scientific world has been growing. The ever-increasing digitisation of information requires the security sector to process millions of data items within extremely short timescales measured in fractions of a second.
One of the most important requirements in the security sector - but also the most difficult to meet - is minimisation of the impact on an activity's actual execution time of the time taken for security checks, particularly in the case of financial transactions, or where it is necessary not to give any evidence that a certain activity is subject to massive cross-checks. In addition, modern methods for the identification of cyber crime increasingly involve techniques requiring the cross-analysis of data coming from several different sources - and these techniques further increase the demand for high levels of computing capacity. These requirements have created a growing need for supercomputers able to perform the large number of checks required in an extremely short time.
'We are very pleased that Selex Elsag has chosen our supercomputer for a fast-expanding application like cyber security,' commented Roberto Siagri, Eurotech's chairman and CEO. 'Right from the start, Aurora architecture has been conceived to be used effectively not only for scientific research but also in the industrial and services domains.'
