SCIENCE

Appro to Support High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) to Improve Supercomputing Capabilities

Appro (http://www.appro.com ) has announced that it has been awarded a subcontract for a 147.5TF Appro 1U-Tetra supercomputers from Lockheed Martin in support of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The HPCMP supports DoD objectives to strengthen national prominence by advancing critical technologies and expertise through use of High Performance Computing (HPC). Research scientists and engineers benefit from HPC innovation to solve complex US defense challenges.

As a subcontractor of Lockheed Martin, Appro will provide system integration, project management, support and technical expertise for the installation and operation of the supercomputers and Lockheed, as a prime contractor will provide overall systems administration, computer operations management, applications user support, and data visualization services supporting five major DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs). This agreement was based on a common goal of helping customers reduce complexity in deploying, managing and servicing their commodity High Performance Computing solutions while lowering their total cost of ownership.

The following are the supercomputing centers where Appro clusters will be deployed through the end of 2010: 

• Army Research Laboratory DSRC at Aberdeen Providing Ground, MD, 
• US Air Force Research Laboratory DSRC at Wright Patterson AFB, OH, 
• US Army Engineer Research and Development Center DSRC in Vicksburg, MS, 
• Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at Stennis Space Center, MS, 
• Arctic Region Supercomputing Center DSRC in Fairbanks, AK.

“We are extremely pleased to work with Lockheed Martin and be part of providing advanced cluster technologies and expertise in High Performance Computing (HPC) in support of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. "Lockheed Martin leads its industry in innovation and has raised the bar for reducing costs, decreasing development time, and enhancing product quality for this important government program, and our products and solutions are a perfect fit for their demanding expectations."

Appro 1U-Tetra supercomputers consist of 21 cluster racks powered by Eight-Core AMD Opteron processors. The system is configured with Appro ACE Management nodes, compute nodes, login nodes, large shared memory nodes, and graphics nodes based on NVIDIA Tesla GPU. The system is supported by large memory and visualization node Graphic Processing Units (GPU) for improved overall performance and faster simulation results. As configured and deployed, the entire system provides 147.5 Tflops aggregate peak performance with 83.4Tflops powered by graphics nodes and a usable memory capacity bandwidth of more than 71.8Terrabytes/s. All compute and graphic nodes in the system are interconnected by a dual-rail QDR Infiniband interconnect fabric that provides reduced inter-processor latency and improved system reliability. The system also offers a bridge directly to an existing global parallel file system through Infiniband fabric allowing high bandwidth parallel access to the storage file system from all of the compute nodes. The system comes pre-configured with the Appro Cluster Engine (ACE) Management System that supports load balanced fault-tolerant interconnect while maximizing the bandwidth associated with MPI processes for mission critical operations.

“Lockheed Martin is looking forward to the Appro 1U-Tetra supercomputer installation as part of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program”; said Jeff Gosciniak, Lockheed Martin Program Manager for the Next Generation Technical Services contract supporting HPCMO. “Appro is partnering with us to improve the reliability, fault tolerance and redundancy of the solution, as well as working with us to improve flexibility for system scaling in the future.”

“IDC projects that the government market for HPC servers will grow substantially to exceed $3 billion in 2014," said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president, technical computing. "The Lockheed Martin contract shows that Appro continues to win significant HPC procurements with a demanding mix of requirements, including dual-rail QDR interconnect capability and hybrid processing that combines x86 and streaming GPU nodes."

“The AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor provides the performance-per-watt, value and consistency customers demand for the evolving HPC market,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded divisions, AMD. “AMD and Appro are committed to delivering HPC solutions to customers like Lockheed Martin that continue to push the envelope in critical workloads, especially where more cores, more memory channels and more features are required.”