SCIENCE

T-Platforms has captured the attention of the global HPC community with an impressive year of technology announcements, global expansion and steady headcount growth, despite the market downturn.

In May of 2010, the company opened its first Western European office in Hanover, Germany and has since realized steady demand for its innovative HPC solutions based on the company’s T-Blade technology and Clustrx software.

To keep up with demand, T-Platforms increased headcount by nearly 60 percent in 2010, with 35 open positions currently, a statistic that clearly bucks the trend of most HPC companies this year.

As an active member of strategic European initiatives such as PROSPECT, T-Platforms continues to step up its commitment to expansion and plans to build a significant R&D and support infrastructure to support clients in Western Europe.

Earlier this year, the company signed a contract with LRZ (Leibniz Rechenzentrum) in Bavaria to deliver a supercomputer prototype incorporating an innovative liquid cooling design and based on the T-Platforms TB2-TL technology and NVIDIA Fermi architecture announced in September. LRZ is well known for its work in this area and the collaboration with T-Platforms focuses on the challenge of energy management and efficiency, a critical component for the development of practical exascale systems.

In October, T-Platforms announced that State corporation “Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs” (VNESHEKONOMBANK) was acquiring an equity position in the company. As part of the equity position arrangement in T-Platforms, Vneshekonombank is providing financing for further expansion of the company’s network of design centers currently located in Russia, Germany, and Taiwan, to develop innovative components and architecture for future T-Platforms HPC solutions. Funds will also be allocated to strengthen T-Platforms’ presence in the global HPC market, supporting sales and production operations of newly established local offices.

Most recently, the company announced a joint development venture named EXTOLL with the University of Heidelberg’s Computing Architecture Group to bring a new supercomputing interconnect technology to market. The goal of this project is to develop an interconnect architecture specifically designed to satisfy the needs of low-latency, inter-process communication in parallel machines.

"T-Platforms has established itself as a visible and credible presence in a short period of time," said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a market research and advisory firm that covers the high performance computing industry. "With its differentiated hardware features and focus on service models, we expect T-Platforms to continue to have opportunities to thrive."