On September 18th, the National University of Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM) and Intel Vietnam signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to team up on a high performance computing project for the city. The partnership comes in the context of a growing HPC capability in southern Asia. China, Vietnam’s neighbor to the north, has been rapidly developing its supercomputing infrastructure and expertise over the past five years. Meanwhile, India, to the west, and Singapore, to the south, are also emerging as regional HPC hubs.
Under the VNU-HCM agreement, Intel will provide an HPC platform, including hardware and tool support, as well as service courses for teachers and administrators. Intel will also support training of university faculty. At the same time, VNU-HCM will develop a Master’s program in HPC, to be instituted in the 2013-2014 school year.
Le Manh Ha, deputy chairman of the HCM City People’s Committee and Raj Hazra, GM of the Intel’s Technical Computing Group and VP of the Intel Architecture Group, signed the agreement to support the project.
An HPC research center will be built to house the needed computing infrastructure. The goal of the facility will be to support research relevant to local problems and socioeconomic development in Ho Chi Minh City — traffic simulation and urban flooding, for example.
The initial phase (2012-2015) of the partnership entails building the HPC research center and deploying a 30-teraflop system, powered by Intel processors. According to the university’s press release, at the end of the first phase the project will be evaluated and a decision will be made to move on to phase two. If all goes as planned, the second phase, which would run to 2020, will involve a system upgrade to a 200-teraflop machine. The release goes on to state that after 2020, Vietnam will need to build a computer system that can deliver up to 1 petaflop of performance.