SCIENCE

Acer has been awarded the contract for Taiwan’s National Center of High-performance Computing’s (NCHC) overhaul of its major supercomputer in Taichung, central Taiwan. Scheduled for completion at the end of March 2011, the supercomputer will offer High-Performance Computing (HPC) services to a wide range of research and industrial customers in Taiwan. The installation is expected to place in the top 50 of the TOP500 fastest supercomputers around the world.

 

Winning this important tender marks a major milestone in the maturity of the business and demonstrates the level of expertise Acer Group acquired in the past year.

 

Acer Group, using its Multi-Brand strategy, with a particular attention to the High Performance Computing market has developed a strong portfolio of High Performance and Technical Computing solutions offering.

 

For this contract Acer, in conjunction with Acer e-Enabling Data Center (eDC), who run one of the largest data center of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, will provide entire system integration encompassing servers, storage, switches, software, and construction of NCHC’s high-density data center with over 600 Acer servers.

 

The NCHC tender offer was contested among a total of 10 applicants, and Acer was announced the winner after six months of intense competition.

 

“This win against strong competition demonstrates clearly that we have invested in the correct strategy for our customers. A comprehensive portfolio integrated with best in market partners has delivered exactly what NCHC needed,” said Gianluca Degliesposti, Acer Vice President of Global Server Business Development.

 

“Acer provided a flexible solution to meet NCHC’s needs and will offer direct support as system integrator,” said Simon Chang, Vice President of Acer eEnabling Services Business Group. “Going forward this partnership will help both parties advance our knowledge and experience in HPC capabilities.”

 

Acer is working closely leading HPC solution providers to provide the pinnacle in clustered computing performance for NCHC:

 

QLogic was chosen by Acer to provide TrueScale Infiniband host adaptors, and industry leading 12800 director class switching products.Both were chosen to take advantage of the industry leading message rate and to exploit QLogic's unique "lowest latency at high scale" design.

 

World leader in high-performance storage systems, DataDirect Network’s Vice President of Marketing, Jeff Denworth, also remarked: “This leadership-class project represents both a dramatic advance in Taiwanese computational capabilities as well as the emergence of a strategic partnership between DDN and Acer. When built, this system will be one of the largest systems in terms of HPC high-performance storage bandwidth in East Asia. DDN’s HPC storage expertise, combined with our worldwide Lustre® deployment capability will be able to offer an optimized solution to compliment the complex computing and management tools delivered by Acer to NCHC and centers all around the world.”

 

Tripp Purvis, Vice President, Business Development, Platform Computing, said: “This success together with Acer marks an incredibly exciting time for us. This system, once deployed, will be running the latest release of Platform HPC, the industry’s most complete HPC management product. In selecting the Platform Computing product, Acer has provided NCHC with everything they need to run a fully optimized National HPC Facility.”

 

Jacques Philouze, WW Vice President Sales & Marketing Allinea Software, comments: “We’re delighted to be working with Acer in Taiwan to provide parallel debugging software which can debug across thousands of cores.  Following on from our recent success in Europe and in USA, we are delighted that our market leadership is now more recognised, and we look forward to expanding our presence in Asia and globally.”

 

The solution includes over 600 servers with a combination of Acer’s AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor-based AR585 F1 server, and Acer’s Intel Xeon based AR360 F1 server. The system will have over 25,000 computing cores, over 70 TB of memory and over 1.1 PB of storage capacity placing it among the fastest and largest supercomputers in the world.

 

HPC is one of the fastest growing computing fields and its uses are expanding all the time. Modern HPC designs make use of clustered computing systems, which combine the power of multiple servers to achieve performance levels far beyond those of a single machine. Customers implementing HPC can range from the weather bureau tracking the latest storm developments, automobile manufacturers designing high performance cars, financial institutions simulating future markets, and even cinema production houses creating special effect-filled movies.