Press release: KTH to break petaflop barrier with new supercomputer

KTH Royal Institute of Technology is due to begin using the fastest academic supercomputer of any university in Scandinavia. A Cray XC40 with 1,676 nodes and a memory of 104.7 terabytes will be installed at KTH’s PDC Center for High Performance Computing. Access to the updated computational capacity will be through the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, SNIC.

The new system will operate at a peak performance of nearly 2 petaflops, which will make it six times faster than the university’s current supercomputer, Lindgren. A single petaflop is equal to one thousand million (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second. And like Lindgren, the new computer will be named after yet another renowned Swedish children’s author – in this case, Elsa Beskow.

The investment in KTH’s new supercomputer – including supporting systems, storage and running costs – has a budget of 170 million SEK divided over four years. The funding comes primarily from SNIC, KTH and industry. After the installation of the system in October, there will be a period of preliminary testing, with the system expected to be in full production on January 1, 2015.

Some of the uses for the computer will include fluid dynamics, climate modelling, plasma physics, neuroscience, materials science and molecular simulation.

The supercomputer will be physically located at KTH’s supercomputer centre PDC. PDC is part of SNIC.

For more information, contact Erwin Laure on 08 790 65 14 or erwinl@pdc.kth.se .

For information in Swedish, please see

www.mynewsdesk.com/se/kth/pressreleases/haer-aer-kth-s-nya-superdator-1054846 .

Note: When Cray was first awarded the contract to supply the new system at PDC, their most powerful series of supercomputers were known as the XC30 series. Since then those systems have been renamed as the XC40 series. Consequently announcements initially stated that PDC's new supercomputer would be an XC30 system.