Global supercomputer leader Cray today announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai with a Cray XC30 supercomputer – the first Cray XC30 system in India.
TIFR is a multi-disciplinary research and teaching institute, and is also a National Centre of the Government of India and a deemed university. Started in 1945 by the late Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, today TIFR carries out research in all frontline areas of fundamental sciences, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and scientific education. TIFR is the birthplace of numerous initiatives and institutions that are now engaged in applied sciences and technology throughout India.
The Cray XC30 system will be used by a nation-wide consortium of scientists called the Indian Lattice Gauge Theory Initiative (ILGTI). The group will research the properties of a phase of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, which existed when the universe was approximately a microsecond old. ILGTI also carries out research on exotic and heavy-flavor hadrons, which will be produced in hadron collider experiments. The Cray XC30 will be the first supercomputer located in ILGTI’s new facility in Hyderabad.
“The researchers and scientists at TIFR are running highly-complex Lattice QCD workloads, and we are honored that India’s first Cray XC30 supercomputer will power the Institute’s important and challenging research,” said Andrew Wyatt, Cray vice president, APMEA. “TIFR’s work with theoretical physics and quantum chromodynamics is an ideal fit for the Cray XC30 system, which is designed to execute highly-advanced numerical computations with superior scalability, performance and reliability.”
The Cray XC30 system to be installed at TIFR will feature the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors, formerly code named “Ivy Bridge,” and NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators. With a peak performance of more than 730 teraflops, the Cray XC30 system is expected to be delivered and installed at TIFR in 2014.
Previously code-named “Cascade,” the Cray XC30 series of supercomputers is engineered to meet the performance challenges of today’s most demanding high performance computing (HPC) users. Special features of the Cray XC30 and Cray XC30-AC™ supercomputers include: the Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; innovative cooling systems to lower customers’ total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment supporting a wide range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment, and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types.
