Supercomputer manufacturer Cray has won a $30m contract to build one for the University of Edinburgh.
The agreement with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is part of the ARCHER project – which aims to provide a new national high performance computing (HPC) facility in the UK
According to the company, the new Cray XC30 supercomputer will offer about four times the processing throughput of the previous Cray XE6 supercomputer, HECToR.
EPSRC chief executive David Delpy said that the council’s primary goal is to increase the ability of UK researchers to make valuable contributions to the solution of ‘grand-challenge’ problems which require the computing ability of supercomputers.
"The ARCHER project advances HECToR’s initiatives to assemble the computational resources necessary for breakthrough research in a broad range of disciplines, and we are pleased that Cray will continue to be a strategic partner for UK research," Delpy added.
Cray will also provide the university with a scalable storage system called the Cray Sonexion, which offers about five petabytes of capacity and 100GBps of application performance.
The contract includes products and multi-year services, under which the system is expected to be delivered and start operations later this year.
