Trailblazing through today's tough economy: Appro Sustaining the Edge with HPC

SuperComputingOnline.com (SC Online) announced today that the Appro HyperGreen Clusters based on the GreenBlade system has received the "Editors' and Readers' Choice 2009 Product of the Year Award." The award is given annually to the product with outstanding innovation in design, value and performance. The products were judged by our publication’s readers in conjunction with a team of HPC experts. This year's products were evaluated based on their ability to change the competitive landscape of the market, whether through innovative features, exceptional value for price/performance, energy-efficiency, remarkable ease of use, or a demonstrable boost to users' productivity.

Our research shows the supercomputing market continued to see strong growth as customers expanded their use of industry standards-based clustered servers. This growth has been driven by purchases from both traditional and new user sites who are able to utilize this technology as improvements in price/performance bring new capabilities within their reach. Supercomputing Online selected the new Appro HyperGreen Clusters because it has met all of the criteria for the award. In addition, customer feedback from all of the vertical markets in the High-performance computing space has been superb.

Launched in Q2 2009, Appro's new power-efficient and performance-optimized systems were the right approach for the company to sustain the edge in the HPC market while allowing customers to accelerate their purchasing decision process. These new power-efficient and performance-optimized platforms provide the building blocks of Appro’s Scalable Units (SUs) and Supercomputing Cluster Architecture delivering lower TCO with a quick path to ROI. Appro’s Scalable Units building blocks enable volume purchase of multiple clusters to be deployed as stand-alone supercomputers for medium and large-sized HPC deployments across a broad range of vertical markets. It provides customers more flexibility and price/performance especially in today’s tough economy. Appro’s high-performance history with its Scalable Supercomputing Cluster Architecture includes large installations to Government, Academia and Enterprise High-Performance Computing customers.

Appro offers the Appro HyperGreen Cluster solution based on the GreenBlade system featuring up to 80 GreenBlade nodes, totaling 640 processing cores per 42U standard rack cabinet, doubling the density compared with traditional 1U rack mounted servers. It offers 1.0TB of internal storage and up to 48GB of memory per node. With its green design, HyperGreen Cluster boasts up to 20% power consumption reduction per node compared to 1U servers, significantly reducing energy bills from the datacenter. In addition, the Appro HyperGreen Cluster provides flexibility with a choice of servers, networking, interconnects and an open commercially supported cluster management solution that can be easily configured and pre-integrated as a part of a complete package to include HPC professional services and support. Customers include organizations such as Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology in Houston, Texas, NASA - Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

Appro says that they will continue to deliver cutting-edge HPC technology and solutions to their customers.

“We are very pleased that Appro HyperGreen Cluster has been recognized by SuperComputing Online’s editors and readers as one of the best products of the year. Appro HyperGreen Cluster provides a scalable, flexible and energy efficient solution that simplifies deployment and management while reducing TCO with a quick path to ROI. Appro HyperGreen Cluster delivers innovative and complete solution that addresses today’s business challenges and budgets for medium to large supercomputing deployments,” said Maria McLaughlin, Marketing Director  of Appro.”

The SC Online 2009 award will be formally presented to Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro by Chris O'Neal, Editor-in-Chief of Supercomputing Online during the Opening Gala Evening Event at the Supercomputing 2009 Conference in Portland, OR on November 16, 2009 at the Appro booth #1200.