The six-cabinet Cray XC40 system will be located in ICM’s OCEAN research data center, and will enable interdisciplinary teams of scientists to address the most computationally complex challenges in areas such as life sciences, physics, cosmology, chemistry, environmental science, engineering, and the humanities. ICM is Poland’s leading research center for computational and data driven sciences, and is one of the premier centers for large-scale high performance computing (HPC) simulations and big data analytics in Central and Eastern Europe. “The new Cray XC40 substantially increases our HPC capabilities,” said Professor Marek Niezg?dka, managing director of ICM. “Contemporary science is undergoing a paradigm shift towards data-intensive scientific discovery. The unprecedented availability of large quantities of data, new algorithms and methods of analysis has created new opportunities for us, as well as new challenges. By selecting the Cray XC40 as our next generation compute platform, we’re investing in our ability to conduct cutting edge research for years to come.”
“Cray and ICM are both actively working toward the convergence of supercomputing and big data and we are excited to partner in this pursuit,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “Cray supercomputers are uniquely designed to allow customers to take advantage of increasingly complex, data-intensive problems. We’re thrilled ICM selected the XC40 supercomputer as their platform-of-choice for conducting their important research.”
This contract marks Cray’s second Cray XC™ supercomputer delivery in Poland this year. In the first quarter of 2015, a Cray XC30™ supercomputer was installed at Stalprodukt S.A., a leading global steel processor, for structural analysis modelling used in the testing of steel designs. The Cray XC40 system at the University of Warsaw will be the largest Cray system in Central and Eastern Europe, and is expected to be delivered in 2015.
Cray XC40 supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of today's most demanding HPC users. Special features of the Cray XC40 supercomputer include: the industry-leading Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; optional DataWarp applications I/O flash SSD accelerator technology; innovative cooling systems to lower customers' total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance and tightly integrated Cray Linux Environment that supports a wide range of applications; Cray's HPC optimized programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types, including Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, and NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU accelerators.
