The news breaks as the DEISA PRACE symposium on European High Performance Computing in Helsinki which attracted 200 participants from 26 countries has put up its papers and presentations up on site for the interested.

The HERMIT contract with Cray includes the delivery of a Cray XE6 supercomputer and the future delivery of Cray's next-generation supercomputer code-named "Cascade."

The new Cray system will serve as a supercomputing resource for researchers, scientists and engineers throughout Europe. HLRS is one of the leading centers in the European PRACE initiative and is the only large European high performance computing (HPC) center to work directly with industrial partners in automotive and aerospace engineering.

HLRS is also a key partner of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), an alliance of the three major German supercomputing centers that collectively provide one of the largest and most powerful supercomputer infrastructures in the world.

"Cray is just the right partner as we enter the era of petaflops computing. Together with Cray's outstanding supercomputing technology, our center will be able to carry through the new initiative for engineering and industrial simulation. This is especially important as we work at the forefront of electric mobility and sustainable energy supply," said Prof. Michael Resch, HLRS director.

The Cray XE6 supercomputer combines Cray's current Gemini system interconnect with AMD Opteron processors, designed to bring production petascale computing to a new and expanded base of HPC users.

Fully upgradeable from the Cray XT5 and Cray XT6 line of supercomputers, the Cray XE6 system delivers improved interconnect performance and features additional enhancements such as improved network resiliency, a mature and scalable software environment and the ability to run a broad array of independent software vendor (ISV) applications with the latest version of the Cray Linux Environment.

This collection of industry-leading features provides Cray XE6 users with a supercomputing system that combines true scalable performance with production reliability.


Cray's next-generation Cascade supercomputer will feature a continuing evolution of Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, the next-generation interconnect chipset follow-on to Gemini and support for future Intel Xeon processors.

The Cascade supercomputer is in part made possible by Cray's participation in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) High Productivity Computing Systems program.

Simulating realistic quantum computing
In just one of the conference offerings  is a presentation on 'Insights on realistic quantum computing devices from simulation' by (right) Professor Hans De Raedt, Zernike Institute for Advance Materials, University of Groningen, Netherlands (collab. with K Michielen, JSC Julich,
S Miyashita Tokyo and B Barbara, CNRS, Grenoble).

"Just as simulation is an integral part of the design
process of new microprocessors, simulation of
physical models of quantum processors is essential
to validate hardware designs," argues the presentation

"Experimental results are validated by comparison to
predictions of quantum theory

"Behavior of physically realizable hardware is not captured by the idealized, mathematical quantum computer model

Accordingly the "Important open question: How many measurements do we need in order to see quantum mechanics at work?"

[Clearly as many angels can dance on the head of a pin!]