GRNET High Performance Computing Infrastructure, codenamed ARIS, has been ranked among the 500 most powerful computers in the world as measured by the LINPACK Benchmark (https://www.top500.org/system/178545).  ARIS went into pilot operational phase in June and it will soon become available for productive use to all researchers and scientists across Greek universities, technological institutions and research centers. The system enables the implementation of scientific and technical large-scale applications, with GRNET guaranteeing its smooth operation offering comprehensive end-user support.
ARIS is built on IBM NeXtScale platform and Intel® Xeon® E5 v2 processors (Ivy Bridge). System theoretical peak performance exceeds 190 TFlops (trillion floating point operations per second). The system houses 426 nodes, offering a total of over 8500 processing CPU cores, interconnected using Infiniband FDR fabric, a technology offering very low latency and  high bandwidth. The infrastructure is complemented with a 1 Petabyte (quadrillion bytes) high performance storage system of, which is built on the IBM Elastic Cloud – the successor of IBM’s Parallel File System (General Parallel File System – GPFS). Finally, the system includes software for developing applications such as compilers, scientific libraries and popular suites of scientific applications.
GRNET is planning for the system’s upgrade and expansion with additional nodes and new capabilities that will double its compute power and will widen the range of application fields that it can respond to, thus providing enhanced capabilities to scientists and researchers.
The infrastructure will be integrated with the European supercomputing ecosystem,  enhancing the ability of Greek users to access the pan European PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) infrastructure and collaborate with their peers worldwide. Additionally, it will become an important center of gravity for technical computing in Greece and South East Europe.
The procurement and installation of the GRNET HPC system is co-financed by the Operational Programme “Attica” / National Strategic Reference Framework and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).