MILPITAS, California, March 5 /PRNewswire/ --

- Appro to Support Renault's Drive for Performance in Formula 1 Racing

Appro (http://www.appro.com), a leading provider of high-performance
enterprise computing systems, today announced that it has been awarded a
contract for a 38TF Appro Xtreme-X(TM) Supercomputer for the ING Renault F1
Team Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Centre, a brand new modern
technology-driven research facility designed to place Renault "in the pole
position" in Formula 1 competition. This award marks another milestone for
Appro's supercomputers in international HPC markets. The Appro Xtreme-X2
Supercomputer will be shipped and installed by Appro at the Renault F1 CFD
Centre in the UK by the end of June, 2008.

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Appro's supercomputer will provide the ING Renault F1 Team's CFD Centre
with a five-fold increase in CFD computing capacity with the ability to run
full-car simulations in addition to the aerodynamic testing of components
such as the front and rear wings, turning vanes, brake ducts, fuel tanks and
more. Appro's Xtreme-X2 meets the capability computing and high availability
requirements needed for the new CFD Centre computational resources. At
current conservative development rates, the expanded facility will provide
50% of the gains of a fully-efficient mature wind-tunnel for less than 50% of
the investment. With this added computing capacity provided by Xtreme-X2, the
Renault F1 Team will generate a measurable competitive advantage to further
establish the company as a technology leader in Formula 1 racing. The
Supercomputer will also be used to expand the current computational support
for Renault F1's integration into the Renault-Nissan group's research and
development efforts. This integration means a valuable CFD resource will be
made available at minimum cost to other business units for research beyond
Formula 1.

"We are extremely pleased to work with ING Renault F1 Team to provide
improved computing capability, better reliability, superior system
performance and an outstanding management system delivered by Appro Xtreme-X2
Supercomputers"; said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. "Appro is excited to partner
with a technology innovator like Renault to achieve the competitive edge in
Formula 1 and beyond."

"Renault is looking forward to the installation of the Appro Xtreme-X2
Supercomputer to enhance our CFD Centre computational resources"; said Bob
Bell, Technical Director of ING Renault F1 Team. "Appro not only offered us a
cost effective solution but they also improved our required technical
specification through better reliability, greater fault tolerance and
redundancy as well as more flexibility with regards to system scalability.

The Xtreme-X2 supercomputer to be delivered to the Renault F1's CFD
centre is based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processor compute nodes. As
configured, the computer has a peak capability of 38TF and is provisioned and
managed as a single unified supercomputing system. The system has 4.4TB of
high performance local memory with a usable aggregate bandwidth of more than
8Terrabytes/s. Each dual processor node has a peak capability of more than
70Gigaflops. The compute nodes in the system are interconnected by a
dual-rail double data rate Infiniband interconnect fabric that provides
reduced inter-processor latency and improved system reliability.

The system comes pre-configured with the Appro Management System that
supports a dual-rail Infiniband network as a load balanced fault-tolerant
interconnect and allows the use of shared receive queues with multi-channel
operation. The software is designed to maximize the bandwidth associated with
MPI processes and to support non-stop operation for mission critical
operations. The system is supported by large memory and visualization nodes
equipped with dual Graphic Processing Units (GPU) to allow large panel
displays to show simulation results. The system also includes a global
parallel file system that is bridged directly to the Infiniband fabric
allowing high bandwidth parallel access to the file system from all of the
compute nodes. In addition, separate from the supercomputers, Appro will
deliver multiple XtremeWorkstations based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM)
processors to ING Renault F1 Team with an impressive amount of memory and GPU
performance.

The Appro Xtreme-X2 supercomputer is managed by the Appro Cluster Engine
(ACE) management software providing a complete, remote lights-out management
solution for the entire system including the interconnect networks, servers,
clusters, resource management and scheduling. It also supports diskless
operation with standard Linux distributions and fast boot operations
independent of the system size. ACE also supports network load balancing and
failover. ACE provides a total management capability for maximum performance
and non-stop operation.

IDC projects that the CAE/CFD market segment alone will more than double
in this decade to reach nearly US$2 billion in 2010," said Steve Conway, IDC
research vice president, technical computing. "The ING Renault F1 Team
contract shows that Appro can win HPC procurements with a demanding mix of
requirements, in this case including dual-rail DDR interconnect capability
and heterogeneous processing that combines x86 and streaming GPU modes."

"The intense computational demands of the ING Renault F1 Team are best
addressed by innovative HPC solutions that can deliver enhanced performance
while keeping power costs low," said Patrick Patla, Director of Product
Management, Server/Workstation Division, AMD (NYSE: AMD). "The combination of
AMD's revolutionary Direct Connect Architecture which provides outstanding
system-level performance, and industry-leading features such as AMD's
innovative power management capabilities and the new AMD Wide Floating Point
Accelerator, a 128-bit floating point unit for increased floating-point
performance, all combine to make native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors an
ideal computing solution for Renault's compute-intensive CFD Centre."

About Appro

Appro is a leading developer of innovative workstations, density-managed
servers, clusters and supercomputers. Appro is uniquely positioned to support
High-Performance Computing markets focusing on medium to large-scale
deployments where lowest total cost of ownership is a primary consideration.
Appro accelerates technical applications and business results unlocking the
value of IT through outstanding price/performance, balanced architecture,
open standards and engineering expertise. Appro headquarters is in Milpitas,
CA, with an R&D/manufacturing center in Asia and a sales and service office
in Houston, TX. To learn more go to http://www.appro.com

About Renault

The ING Renault F1 Team was born in 2002 with a singular purpose: winning
the FIA Formula One World Championship with a 100% Renault car. Drawing on a
heritage of motorsport innovation that stretches back to Renault's first
Formula 1 race in 1977, and includes six world constructors' championships
during the 1990s when Renault supplied V10 engines to front-running F1
competitors, the team steadily grew in competitiveness since 2002 thanks to a
blend of performance, reliability and technology reinforced by the
engineering expertise of the Renault Group. The team reached the pinnacle of
performance during the 2005 and 2006 seasons, winning the drivers' and
constructors' championships in both seasons in an historic double-double
achievement. After such highs, 2007 proved to be a difficult year, but the
resolve remains strong for 2008. With renewed optimism, an exciting driver
line-up and innovative technical package, the team approaches the new season
determined to bounce back and ready to fight at the front of the field.

AMD, AMD Opteron and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced
Micro Devices, Inc.

Web site: http://www.appro.com