By Matthew Dublin

Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan) is upgrading its Cray XT6m system to a new Cray XE6 supercomputer-and dropping the "T6m" and adding the "E6"will make all the difference...But seriously, the new upgrade will provide the KTH's Center for High Performance Computing with over 300-teraflops for range of scientific disciplines including medicine, biology, and life sciences.

"The Cray supercomputer is the most powerful academic system in Sweden right now," says Dr. Erwin Laure, director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. "It has 93 teraflops peak performance at the moment, and when the system is fully upgraded later this year, the peak performance will reach more than 300 teraflops. That will make the PDC/KTH supercomputer one of Europe's most powerful computers. SNIC and KTH's investment in this system is providing a very good opportunity to keep pace with the rest of the world in terms of research that requires large computational resources."

The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) has announced that it will deploy SGI's new Altix UV 1000 supercomputer, named Koronis, to aid roughly 30 University of Minnesota faculty working on multi-scale modeling, chemical dynamics, bioinformatics and computational biology, and biomedical imaging projects. Koronis will feature a 1,152-core SGI Altix UV 1000 system with a shared-memory architecture and will also include high-performance visualization workstations to handle large-size biomedical data and high-performance and storage.

MSI investigators are already planning the jobs they will run on Koronis, including the development of new theoretical tools for biocatalysis and multi-scale quantum models for ribozyme catalysis, using computational methods to simulate complex chemical reactions that are catalyzed by biological molecules.