Cray Signs $53 Million Contract for HPC at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology

Cray Inc. announced the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia has awarded the company a contract worth up to $53 million to provide a Cray XC40 supercomputer and a Cray Sonexion 2000 storage system.

This further strengthens Cray’s position in the global operational weather and climate community as an increasing number of the world’s maincenters rely on Cray supercomputers to run their complex meteorological and mission critical models.

With HQs in Melbourne and offices in each Australian state capital city, the Bureau of Meteorology is Australia’s national weather, climate and water agency. Its expertise and services assist Australians to better manage the impacts of their natural environment, including drought, floods, fires, storms, tsunami and tropical cyclones. Through regular forecasts, warnings, monitoring and advice spanning the Australian and Antarctic region, the Bureau provides one of the most fundamental and widely used services of government.

This contract marks a return of Cray systems to the Bureau, which in the past ran its weather models on earlier generation X-MP and Y-MP supercomputers. With the Bureau’s new XC40 supercomputer, researchers and scientists will have the computational resources to run nearly eight times as many more daily forecasts than their current system with five times the improvement in model resolution.

“The Bureau of Meteorology produces a wide range of weather forecasts and meteorological services that have significant socio-economic impacts to a vast number of people, and we are honored that a Cray supercomputer will power their models,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO, Cray. “The amazing amount of data and science embedded in weather and climate models is a great example of how data-driven our world is becoming today. Our vision and experience in helping customers leverage the increased complexity of data-intensive, production-quality supercomputers is a huge part of why the world’s leading operational weather and climate centers continue to turn to Cray. We are excited to be back in the Bureau, and we look forward to a long partnership.“

XC40 supercomputers are engineered to meet the performance challenges of most demanding HPC users. Special features of the Cray XC40 supercomputer include: the Aries system interconnect; a Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; optional DataWarp applications I/O flash SSD accelerator technology; cooling systems to lower customers’ TCO; the next-generation of the scalable, performance and tightly integrated Cray Linux environment that supports a wide range of applications; Cray’s HPC optimized programming environment for improved performance and programmability, and the ability to handle a variety of processor types, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.

The Sonexion 2000 storage at the Bureau will be delivered in phases and, all total, will include more than 12PB of performance storage capacity. Sonexion storage system combines Cray’s Lustre expertise with an integrated design that allows for scalability and performance. Management and operations are simplified through an appliance design with all storage components including software, storage and infrastructure.

Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract includes contracted deliverables and options for future deliverables. If the options are exercised as expected, the total contract is valued at about $53 million, net of applicable taxes.

The first phase of the contract is expected to be completed in 2016 and if exercised, the second phase is expected to be completed in 2019.