CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science, Upgrades Cray Supercomputer To One of Europe’s Most Powerful

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq GM: CRAY) and CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd, today announced that CSC's Cray supercomputer has been upgraded to over 85 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second).

This makes the new Cray XT5 system at CSC the most powerful academic supercomputer in the Nordic countries and one of the fastest supercomputers in Europe.

Later this year, a second upgrade funded under the EU's Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative will boost the Cray system's peak performance to 100 teraflops. PRACE, which already includes 16 nations, enables European scientists and engineers to access world-class high performance computing resources. The 100-teraflops Cray supercomputer will take one-thousandth of a second to solve a problem that ESKO, the first Finnish academic computer, would have taken 50 years to solve a half century ago.

Nordic researchers will use the supercomputer to solve scientific and engineering problems in a wide range of fields including turbulence and climate change, energy research, materials science, and gene interactions and medical research.

“The first upgrade of the Cray supercomputer ensures that Finnish researchers and engineers will continue to have access to world-class computing resources. The second, PRACE upgrade confirms CSC’s strong position and influence in building European co-operation,” said Kimmo Koski, managing director of CSC. “This powerful resource strengthens Finland's position as an attractive environment for world-class research.”

“We are delighted that CSC Finland's user community and PRACE users will have access to Cray's newest supercomputer technology,” said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. “As one of the most prominent supercomputing centers in Europe with a broad range of computational scientific disciplines, CSC is in an excellent position to maximize the advantages of our system in doing large scale capability computing in a production supercomputer environment and in solving the most demanding scientific problems.”

CSC and Cray Inc. will arrange a workshop on porting and optimizing programs for the Cray XT4/XT5 architecture on November 3-6, 2008. For more information, go to http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/courses/archive/crayworkshop2008.