India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences has awarded supercomputing company Cray a $67 million contract to deploy two high performance computing (HPC) and storage systems.

The Cray XC40 supercomputers and Cray ClusterStor storage will be used for weather forecasting and climate research.

MoES def

One of the systems will be located at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, India, and the other at the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, India.

Together, the systems have a peak performance of more than six petaflops, and more than 18 petabytes of Cray ClusterStor storage capacity.

“Our new Cray supercomputing systems provide MoES’ scientists with the computational power needed for producing more accurate and reliable weather forecasts at much higher resolutions,” Dr. Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, Secretary of MoES, Government of India, said.

“Our country needs better forecasts for weather and climate events such as monsoons, tsunamis, cyclones, and extreme heat waves and cold snaps, and so it is imperative that we augment our HPC facilities with highly-advanced supercomputing systems. The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.”

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, added: “MoES has made a substantial enhancement to its high-performance computing infrastructure, and we are honored Cray was chosen to provide both the supercomputing and storage technologies necessary for improving their extensive range of important weather services for the people of India.”

“The world’s preeminent global weather centers, like MoES, continue to rely on Cray supercomputers to power their weather forecasts. Our leadership position in earth sciences is representative of our proven ability to build production-ready supercomputing and storage systems across many data-intensive workloads such as weather forecasting, analytics, and artificial intelligence.”