14 DAY TRIAL // It seems to be that, even while making PCs, tablets and all other sorts of electronics, Acer still had more than enough time and resources to invest in the making of what is no the fastest supercomputer in Taiwan.
Acer has been busy in Taiwan over the past year, and while this didn't stop it from setting up the upgrade of a certain tablet, it did lead to a new HPC installation.
Said supercomputer is dubbed ALPS (Advanced Large Parallel System) and has a total performance of 177 TFLOPS.
It is based in the Taiwan National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) and is nicknamed Windrider.
Based on the latest AMD Opteron 6000 series processors, it features over 25,000 compute cores, 1 large memory cluster and 8 compute clusters.
“This system was a great opportunity for Acer to demonstrate our computing ability in the most demanding environments. Supercomputing is a benchmark for all fields of IT and proves Acer servers are ready to carve their space in datacenter environments,” says Acer Corporate President, Jim Wong.
Acer was assisted in the making of the Windrider by AMD, Qlogic, DataDirect Networks and Platform Computing.
The ALPS will be utilized in science research, like engineering, biotechnology, alternative energy, disaster simulation and chemistry.
“We greatly appreciate having Acer and its partners’ experience and expertise on this difficult case. Under tight deadlines, they were able to work with NCHC teams to complete this complex system,” stated NCHC’s deputy director, Weichang Huang.
“In addition to the largest system ever built in Taiwan, the experience learned from this effort has offered a great deal of knowledge for both NCHC and Acer, boosting the expertise of the HPC community of Taiwan to the next level.”
While it is not in use yet, the new HPC will begin its operation next month (July 2011). It has the rank 42 on the June 2011 TOP500 list.