HPC Update: News from Amazon, Cray, Fujitsu

Here’s our review of some of today’s noteworthy links for the high performance computing industry:

Amazon loads HPC instances in Ireland. Amazon has made Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xl) instances available from its EU West - Ireland region. Each instance includes a pair of Intel Xeon processors, 60.5 GB of RAM, and 3.37 TB of instance storage. AWS recorded position 72 in the June 2012 Top500 list, with a cluster of 1064 cc2.8xi instances and 17,024 cores, clocked in at 240 Teraflops. "The arrival of the cc2.8xlarge instance size in the EU West region allows customers who store data in that geography to compute, analyse, ask questions and find insight from that data using high performance Intel Xeon E5 processors," said Matt Wood, product manager for high performance and data intensive computing at AWS."This brings the power of a purpose designed HPC environment with 10GbE fully bisectional networking to customers with the same on-demand, utility metering offered by other AWS services, providing faster turn arounds, larger computational runs and a shorter time to market."

Cray signs $40 million supercomputer with NERSC. Cray announced it will install a next-generation Cray supercomputer code-named "Cascade" and a next-generation Cray Sonexion storage system at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). In addition to a Cray XE6 named Hopper at NERSC, the "Cascade" supercomputer will be used to advance open science research in climate modeling, biology, environmental sciences, combustion, materials science, chemistry, geosciences, fusion energy, astrophysics, nuclear and high-energy physics, and other disciplines, along with scientific visualization of massive data sets. Berkley's Kathy Yelick says that the new Cray system will be very energy efficient, enabling many features, including the ability to run year-round using "free-cooling" at the NERSC site. "The researchers and scientists at NERSC are tackling an amazing set of important challenges across a wide range of scientific disciplines, and we are incredibly honored to provide their vast user community with a productive environment that also delivers high sustained performance," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Our development team has been busy working on our future products and we are very excited to see that the new innovations in our next generation of supercomputers and storage solutions are meeting the needs of leading customers such as NERSC. They are a great partner and we are excited that our relationship with them will continue."

Fujitsu selected for Taiwan meteorological forecasting.  Fujitsu announced that the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) of Taiwan has selected its PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer system for use in numerical weather predictions. Starting in 2012 it will be delivered over three years in stages, and reach a top theoretical peak performance , exceeding one petaflop, by December 2014. In addition to daily weather forecasting for Taiwan, the system will improve the country's ability to monitor and forecast typhoons, tropical storms and other meteorological hazards. "When we were planning to upgrade to a new system, we put together a plan for the computing resources required to further improve the analytical precision of our weather forecasting model and to employ large-scale applications. For this project, Fujitsu presented us with a very comprehensive set of solutions and services. This collaboration with Fujitsu will allow us to gain new technology and experience, and will improve the precision of our weather forecasts for all of Taiwan and contribute to reducing damage caused by meteorological disasters."