Cray Inc. announced it has been awarded a $23 million contract to provide two Cray XC30 supercomputers and two Cray Sonexion 1600 storage systems to Germany's National Meteorological Service - the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany, DWD is one of the world's premier numerical weather prediction centers. Researchers and scientists at DWD will be able to apply the petascale computing resources of the two Cray XC30 supercomputers - one of which will be used for production and the other for research and backup - towards its mission of meeting the meteorological requirements arising from all areas of economy and society in Germany.

The new Cray supercomputers will enable DWD to produce higher resolution and more accurate global and regional weather forecasts to help fulfill the organization's wide array of weather responsibilities, such as the meteorological safeguarding of aviation and shipping, and the issuance of official warnings of weather occurrences that could become a danger for public safety. Previously code-named "Cascade," the Cray XC30 supercomputer is the company's most advanced high performance computing (HPC) system and is engineered to meet the performance challenges of HPC users. The Cray XC30 supercomputer features the new Aries system interconnect; a new Dragonfly network topology that frees applications from locality constraints; an innovative cooling system that utilizes a transverse airflow to lower customers' total cost of ownership; the next-generation of the scalable, high performance Cray Linux Environment that also supports a wide range of ISV applications; the company's HPC optimized programming environment; and the ability to handle a wide variety of processor types including the Intel Xeon processors - a first for the company's high-end systems. The two Cray Sonexion 1600 storage systems that will be deployed at DWD will have a combined capacity of more than 3 petabytes of storage and 72 gigabytes per-second of combined bandwidth.

The company's Sonexion Lustre System for HPC provides an embedded, compact design that can reduce the overall storage footprint by up to 50% over component-based solutions. Sonexion ensures consistency and predictability when scaling Lustre, and offers precision performance, optimal scalability, and an open solution for HPC and Big Data in a compact form factor. Consisting of products and services, the multi-year, multi-phase contract is valued at more than $23 million, and the systems are expected to be delivered and put into production in 2013 and 2014.