Cray Joins OpenStack, Wins $54M Supercomputer Contract

Supercomputer manufacturer Cray has joined the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor. The company made the announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC14) last week in Leipzig, Germany, where it also announced award of a $54 million contract  to provide the Korea Meteorological Administration with two next-generation Cray XC supercomputers.

Prepping for OpenStack integration

As a corporate sponsor of OpenStack Cray will promote the open source cloud operating system and over time provide customers with common APIs, common infrastructure and core frameworks over time. It also opens the door to integration opportunities for Cray supercomputers among OpenStack suppliers and partners.

Joining OpenStack continues an open source theme for Cray over the ISC14 event, where it also announced a new data management and protection solution for Lustre (a popular open source file system for large-scale clusters, typically used in academic research) on Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage. Cray's previous open source endeavors include participation in organizations such as OpenMP, OpenSFS, OpenACC and more.

"We want to ensure that Cray customers benefit from interoperability with OpenStack," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "System management capabilities with OpenStack, for example, will help improve total cost of ownership, productivity and ease-of-use in sophisticated data center environments. We support the OpenStack Foundation because it enables our customers to take advantage of the economics and flexibility of open source by leveraging OpenStack capabilities."

Supercomputer for forecasting and climate research

As a leading operational weather forecasting and climate research center, KMA will use the next-generation Cray XC supercomputers in conjunction with a Cray Sonexion storage system to provide more accurate weather forecasts through increased model resolution, new forecasting models, increased ensemble sizes and the implementation of advanced data assimilation. The storage solution will include 21.7 petabytes of capacity and 270 gigabytes-per-second performance.

"Weather forecasting and climate research play vital roles in societies across the globe, and we are honored that KMA, one of the premier centers in this important industry, has once again selected a Cray system to meet their demanding requirements for producing an extensive range of meteorological services," said Andrew Wyatt, Cray vice president, APMEA.

The $54 million multi-year, multi-phase contract consists of products and services and is expected to be completed in 2015.