Acer constructs Taiwan's fastest supercomputer (Video)

James Delahunty
23 Jun 2011 23:25

Acer constructs 177 TFLOP supercomputer, ranks 42nd on latest TOP500 list.
After being awarded the contract in November 2010, Acer constructed the supercomputer for the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. The 177 TFLOPS ALPS (Advanced Large Parallel System) supercomputer, nicknamed Windrider, utilizes the latest AMD Opteron 6000 Series processors. It features a total of 8 compute clusters, 1 large memory cluster and 25,000 compute cores.
As the leading research institute in Taiwan for high-performance computer (HPC), the NCHC works with enterprise and academic institutes to take part in joint research. The new system, the fastest of its kind in Taiwan, will be used for research in science and engineering, disaster simulations, alternative energy, biotechnology, chemistry and more.
NCHC's director, Kuo-Ning Chiang
"The decision to build this machine was made out of necessity. NCHC provides supercomputing resources to Taiwan's many research groups and universities, and our previous machine with only 20 TFLOPS had a long waiting list for running computing jobs. The new system by Acer not only satisfies the current demand, but gives us a lot of room to grow."

Acer VP of global server business development, Gianluca Degliesposti
"Acer's strong portfolio of High Performance and Technical Computing systems, integrated with industry leading technology partners, allowed us to deploy a custom HPC infrastructure able to support a wide range of applications to meet the needs of a diverse user community."

In order to meet a broad set of HPC needs, the system's architecture is flexible to grow or shrink depending on the computing demand, and since all requests are off loaded from clients located all over Taiwan and the surrounding Asia region, the system advances the concept of HPC in the cloud.