Researchers in Taiwan are gearing up for the launch of a new supercomputer. Set to go online in July, the 170-teraflop machine will be used to further scientific research in fields such as physics and chemistry. The project is being overseen by the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL), Taiwan’s national research organization, which works to promote the nation’s critical technologies, including high performance computing.
The home-grown cluster system is being built by Acer Inc. at a cost of $10.26 million. The original design specs call for a machine with 600-plus servers, a combination of AMD Opteron- and Intel Xeon-based models, incorporating more than 25,000 cores and over 70 terabytes of memory, with a minimum of 1.1 petabytes of storage. Acer is working closely with HPC vendors QLogic, DataDirect Network, Platform Computing and Allinea Software to provide a soup-to-nuts solution.
According to Chiang Kuo-ning, director of Taiwan’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (one of NARL’s research arms), the supercomputer will be capable of performing 170 trillion floating point calculations per second, which will place the it among the 50-55th fastest in the world, as designated by the twice-yearly TOP500 list. Chiang added that the new system will provide a big boost in power compared to Taiwan’s current top number-cruncher, which operates at 20 teraflops.
Although the as-of-yet unnamed machine was originally scheduled for a March 2011 coming-out party, its updated July launch will coincide with the Republic of China’s centennial celebrations. The supercomputer will be installed at the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC).