Japan's University of Tsukuba Selects Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputers for Next Generation...

Japan's University of Tsukuba Selects Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputers for Next
Generation High Performance Computing
Cray Technical Services to provide Local Service and Support

MILPITAS, Calif., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Appro (http://www.appro.com), a
leading provider of high-performance enterprise computing systems, announces
today it has been awarded a contract for a 95TF Appro Xtreme-X(TM)
Supercomputer for the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of
Tsukuba, to be located in the center of Tsukuba Science City. The region is
well known for its large concentration of advanced research institutions in
various areas of science and technology. The Tsukuba award is a major
breakthrough for Appro's supercomputers into the Japanese HPC market.
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The University chooses Appro's Xtreme-X3 Supercomputer for its matchless
Quad-Rail system interconnect, which provides the lowest-latency and the
highest bandwidth performance to meet both capacity and capability computing
requirements for Tsukuba's computational scientific research programs. The
Appro Xtreme-X3 Supercomputer will be shipped and installed by Appro at the
University by the end of May 2008.
Appro will partner with Cray Technical Services and Sumisho Computer
Systems (SCS), a major IT trading company in Japan, to deliver the system and
service to the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba.
As the prime contractor, SCS combined both Appro HPC solutions while Cray
Technical Services supplied local service and support, providing technical
expertise for the installation and operation of the supercomputer. 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.
"Cray Technical Services has a distinguished history of successfully
delivering large-scale HPC solutions to our government and commercial
customers," said Mamoru Nakano, president of Cray Japan. "The University of
Tsukuba is dedicated to elevating the international competitiveness of
Japanese universities and is quickly becoming a world-class, internationally
competitive institute of higher education. We welcome this opportunity to
work with Appro to provide local support and service for this significant HPC
Solution in Japan."
The Appro Xtreme-X3 will be used principally to provide needed
computational support for scientific research and computer science programs
covering a wide range of research and education areas, including artificial
intelligence, massively parallel computing, and other leading-edge science and
technology. The Department promotes researchers capable of analyzing and
solving various problems in computer systems and specific research fields,
including Information Mathematics and Modeling, Intelligent Software, Software
System, Computer Architecture and Media Engineering.
"Appro has stepped into the HPC market limelight by winning contracts for
large-scale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy's tri-labs and now at the
University of Tsukuba, one of Japan's leading academic research institutions,"
said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for HPC. "IDC projects that
clusters will continue to be the main growth engines for the HPC market,
driving server revenue from $10 billion dollar in 2006 to more than $15
billion in 2011."
The Xtreme-X3 supercomputer consists of a total of 674 quad-socket,
Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processor-based compute nodes with 2,696 processors
and a total of 10,784 processing cores. As configured, the computer has 95TF
of computing capability, but can scale to up to 120TF and still be provisioned
and managed as a single unified supercomputing system. The system provides
21.5TB of high performance local memory with a usable aggregate bandwidth of
more than 20Terrabytes/s. Each node has a peak capability of almost
150Gigaflops and can support up to 256GB of high bandwidth ECC memory. The
Xtreme-X3 provides
16-way SMP nodes enabling the system to host extremely large shared memory
problems with outstanding performance. For capability computing, it features
a matchless four-rail interconnect fabric configured with four double data
rate ConnectX low latency infiniband Fabric host channel adapters from
Mellanox technologies. Each Host Channel Adapter is connected to a separate
PCI-Express interface to maximize performance while the Infiniband technology
balances the high bandwidth and the large number of threads supported by the
compute nodes. The interconnect fabric with each connection is capable of
operating at a peak rate of 2GB/s in each direction. The measured usable
unidirectional node to node performance is greater than 6GB/s.
In addition, the system comes pre-configured with the Appro Cluster
Management System that supports multi-channel MPI operation with shared
received queues where a single MPI program can send on 1, 2 or 4 channels and
receive on any channel. It is designed to manage large numbers of independent
physical computers connected together by high speed networks, allowing them to
function as a single computing system. This system is configured with 44
management nodes and support nodes to run the Appro Cluster Engine (ACE)
software, while supporting a large parallel file storage system from Data
Direct Networks.
The Appro Xtreme-X3 will be managed by ACE software providing a complete,
remote lights-out management system for the entire system to include the
interconnect networks, servers, clusters, resource management and scheduling.
It also supports diskless operation with standard Linux distributions and fast
boot operations independent of the system size. ACE also supports network
load balancing and failover, delivering a total management capability for
maximum performance and non-stop operation.
"The Appro Xtreme-X3 Supercomputer ideally matches the University of
Tsukuba's requirements for a high-performance and high availability solution,"
said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. "With outstanding performance provided by a
unique Quad-Rail system interconnect to provide the lowest-latency and the
best high bandwidth system performance, the Appro Xtreme-X3 meets both
capacity and capability computing requirements for production systems. This
represents a significant development in Appro's continued growth in
large-scale cluster deployments with price/performance leadership."
"Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors offer outstanding scalability,
especially in four socket systems. They also deliver the memory performance
that is critical to HPC applications, based on the benefits of AMD's
revolutionary Direct Connect Architecture, integrated memory controller and
HyperTransport(TM) technology," said Patrick Patla, Director of Product
Management, Server/Workstation Division, AMD (NYSE: AMD) "The Direct Connect
Architecture combined with our new 128-bit floating point unit, in concert
with the flexibility and scalability of Appro's system design, will help the
University of Tsukuba continue to produce world-class results in science and
computational research."
About Appro
Appro is a leading developer of innovative workstations, density-managed
servers, clusters and supercomputers. Appro is uniquely positioned to support
High-Performance Computing markets focusing on medium to large-scale
deployments where lowest total cost of ownership is a primary consideration.
Appro accelerates technical applications and business results unlocking the
value of IT through outstanding price/performance, balanced architecture, open
standards and engineering expertise. Appro headquarters is in Milpitas, CA,
with an R&D/manufacturing center in Asia and a sales and service office in
Houston, TX. To learn more go to http://www.appro.com
About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced
supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry
and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve
remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and
extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray's
Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation
products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified
architecture, allowing customers to surpass today's limitations and meeting
the market's continued demand for realized performance. Go to
http://www.cray.com for more information.
About Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS)
Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS), founded in 1969, offers a wide
range of system integration services to companies not only in Japan but
worldwide. SCS aims to be in the first tier in the IT services industry,
focusing on three strategic business domains: the industry-specific
application business, which utilizes expert knowledge in each industry to
customize system architecture to client needs; the ERP solutions business,
which includes proprietary packaged software; and the platform solution
business, which concentrates on IT architecture services for the creation of
IT systems. More information can be found at
http://www.scs.co.jp/english/index.html
About University of Tsukuba and Center for Computational Sciences
The University of Tsukuba takes an active role in promoting efforts to
improve both advanced education and academic research in Japan. In addition,
the University supports highly specialized professionals and students with
global perspective and advanced technical skills in research fields to include
Information Mathematics and Modeling, Intelligent Software, Software System,
Computer Architecture, and Media Engineering. The Center for Computational
Sciences is a dedicated research center for a wide variety of computational
sciences under collaboration with computer science researchers. The center
will operate this Supercomputer for a variety of cutting-edge computational
sciences to include Computational Particle Physics, Computational
Astrophysics, Computational Material Science, Computational Biology,
Computational Chemistry and Geo Science as well as more general applications
for cluster and grid computing.To learn more go to
http://www.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD
Opteron and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices,
Inc. HyperTransport is a licensed trademark of the HyperTransport Technology
Consortium.
SOURCE Appro International, Inc.

Maria McLaughlin of Appro International, Inc., +1-408-888-6661,
mmclaughlin@appro.com