Cray has announced that the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India has deployed two Cray XC40 supercomputers and two Cray ClusterStor storage systems as part of a $67 million contract with Cray to update its supercomputing facilities.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) is dedicated to providing world-class weather, climate, ocean, and seismological services to the citizens of India, and has significantly upgraded its high-performance computing capabilities to better support its operational and research activities.
‘Our new Cray supercomputing systems provide MoES’ scientists with the computational power needed for producing more accurate and reliable weather forecasts at much higher resolutions,’ said Dr Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, government of India. ‘Our country needs better forecasts for weather and climate events such as monsoons, tsunamis, cyclones, and extreme heat waves and cold snaps, and so it is imperative that we augment our HPC facilities with highly-advanced supercomputing systems. The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.’
The two Cray systems are located at two divisions of MoES – the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India, and the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, India.
The Cray supercomputer at IITM will be used for conducting research on improving weather and climate forecasts, and the system – named ‘Pratyush’ which means the Sun – will also be used by other MoES organisations for research activities to improve their respective weather and climate services. The NCMRWF will use its Cray supercomputer to run daily, operational weather forecasts. The combined supercomputing systems have a peak performance of more than six petaflops, and more than 18 petabytes of storage capacity.
With the completion of this contract more than three-quarters of the World Meteorological Organisation’s Long Range Global Modelling Centres have selected Cray supercomputers for numerical weather prediction.
‘MoES has made a substantial enhancement to its high-performance computing infrastructure, and we are honoured Cray was chosen to provide both the supercomputing and storage technologies necessary for improving their extensive range of important weather services for the people of India,’ said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. ‘The world’s preeminent global weather centres, like MoES, continue to rely on Cray supercomputers to power their weather forecasts. Our leadership position in earth sciences is representative of our proven ability to build production-ready supercomputing and storage systems across many data-intensive workloads such as weather forecasting, analytics, and artificial intelligence.’
Consisting of products and services, the multi-year contract is valued at more than $67 million. The systems were accepted in late 2017.
