Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology Advances Weather Forecasting With New Cray Supercomputer and Storage

SEATTLE and FRANKFURT, Germany, June 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today at the 2019 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) announced that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) is adding a third Cray® CS-Storm™ supercomputer with Cray ClusterStor® storage to support the development of cutting-edge weather service products at the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss). The new CS-Storm system will join two Cray supercomputers already on site at CSCS, used by MeteoSwiss to run production weather forecasting. The job of the newly-accepted CS-Storm is to allow MeteoSwiss to run larger ensemble predictions and higher resolution weather models to improve forecast accuracy.

“Forecasting weather is like a 24-hour marathon–it never stops and it requires technology to keep pace,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas Schulthess, director of CSCS. “And the complexity is growing in weather and climate forecasting and modeling as we put advanced workloads to the test. Our partnership with Cray continues to provide us the compute resources necessary so customers like MeteoSwiss can tackle the biggest challenges in meteorological research. This new system will make it possible for them to more accurately predict the weather.”

MeteoSwiss continually invests in innovation and development for the benefit of the economy and public safety. With CSCS’ purchase of its first two Cray CS-Storm systems in 2015, MeteoSwiss became the first major national weather service to use a GPU-accelerated supercomputer to run production numerical weather models. And with its latest CS-Storm – designed for organizations that require the performance and efficiency of today’s latest GPU accelerators ­– MeteoSwiss will continue with the GPU approach.

“Complete, extremely detailed forecasts is our vision for the future,” said Philippe Steiner, Head of Numerical Prediction at MeteoSwiss. “Switzerland’s unique orography adds a level of complexity to forecasting that requires us to develop advanced, data-intensive modeling methods and techniques. With this latest technology from Cray, MeteoSwiss will be able to run increasingly complex, high-resolution models for higher-accuracy forecasts and nowcasts, as well as to develop additional weather forecast products.”

MeteoSwiss found success with its existing Cray supercomputers and selected this new CS-Storm to provide the additional computational power required to process increasing volumes of weather observations and produce higher fidelity forecasts. The CS-Storm system was also selected for its ability to run numerical weather forecasts within a reduced energy footprint (as compared to competing solutions), and for the reliability the platform provides MeteoSwiss when running critical workloads.

“The new Cray CS-Storm at CSCS equips MeteoSwiss with the computational performance required to power next-generation weather forecasts. Cray is proud to play a part in helping support the amazing work MeteoSwiss does to keep Swiss citizens safe, informed and protected through accurate and timely weather forecasts,” said Ilene Carpenter, Earth Sciences Segment Director at Cray.

CSCS’ new CS-Storm® is configured with 18 compute nodes, each with 8 NVIDIA® V100 GPUs and 2 Intel® Xeon® Gold 6134 CPUs, and includes two Cray ClusterStor® L300 storage systems. The CS-Storm was accepted in April 2019 and will become fully operational in 2020.

About Cray Inc.
Cray Inc. (Nasdaq:CRAY) combines computation and creativity so visionaries can keep asking questions that challenge the limits of possibility. Drawing on more than 45 years of experience, Cray develops the world’s most advanced supercomputers, pushing the boundaries of performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray continues to innovate today at the convergence of data and discovery, offering a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers, high-performance storage, data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions. Go to www.cray.com for more information.

Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including, but not limited to, statements related to the deployment and performance of the system delivered to CSCS. These statements involve current expectations, forecasts of future events and other statements that are not historical facts. Inaccurate assumptions and known and unknown risks and uncertainties can affect the accuracy of forward-looking statements and cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect actual future events or results include, but are not limited to, the risk that the system delivered to CSCS is not deployed when expected or does not perform as expected and such other risks as identified in the Company’s quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2019, and from time to time in other reports filed by Cray with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this release. Cray undertakes no duty to publicly announce or report revisions to these statements as new information becomes available that may change the Company’s expectations.

CRAY and ClusterStor are registered trademarks of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries. CS-Storm is a trademark of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.