Cray installs India's first petaflop supercomputer at Indian Institute of Science

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc today announced the operationalisation of a new Cray XC40 supercomputer at the Supercomputing Education and Research Center (SERC) of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. With more than 1.4 petaflops of computing performance, the Cray supercomputer nick-named `SahasraT' at SERC is the first petaflop system in India, according to Cray.

Located at the IISc, a premier research institution for advanced scientific and technological research and education in India, SERC is the country's leading computing center with state-of-the art facilities that cater to the ever-increasing demands of high performance computing (HPC) for scientific and engineering research in India. The center leads several national initiatives on HPC, and is actively involved in research projects and consultancy in collaboration with government agencies and private companies.

The Cray XC40 supercomputer at SERC will serve as the primary system for cutting-edge research in science and engineering at the IISc, according to a Cray release.

"We are proud that SERC is now home to India's first petaflop supercomputing system, which will power the center's important computational science initiatives," said Nick Gorga, Cray's vice president of sales, Asia Pacific.

"The IISc is India's premier institution for advanced scientific and technological research and education, and we are honored that a Cray XC40 supercomputer is the center's primary computing resource for the IISc user community. Our customer base in India continues to grow, and we look forward to our new partnership with the IISc and its researchers and engineers," he added.

The Cray XC40 supercomputer at SERC features Intel Xeon processors, and includes Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.

Cray XC40 supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of today's most demanding HPC users.

The Cray XC40 supercomputer boasts of: industry-leading Aries system interconnect; 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 Cray Linux Environment supporting a wide range of applications; Cray's HPC optimised programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types in a tightly-integrated system infrastructure, the release added.